Halloween coincides with the change in season, so now is the perfect time not only to go out and get drunk in a werewolf mask, but also to curl up under a blanket with a good book. Thanks to this year's crop of notable horror novels, you can still get a dose of fright if you decide to do the latter.

The country is currently in the grip of vampire fever, what with the popularity of HBO series "True Blood" and the omnipresent Twilight franchise. So now would seem like a good time for a big new vampire series to hit shelves, especially one that boasts a sparkling cross-medium pedigree. The story that became The Strain (William Morrow, $26.95) was concocted as a TV show by Guillermo del Toro, the writer-director behind Pan's Labyrinth, and Chuck Hogan, author of the beloved crime novel Prince of Thieves. Now, it's the first part of a planned trilogy co-authored by del Toro and Chuck Hogan.

It starts with an airplane landing in New York City with almost every passenger dead. Oh, and there's a coffin-like box filled with dirt in the cargo hold. From there, The Strain becomes a kind of slow-burn disaster movie, with techno-jargon clumsily colliding with monster mythos and post-9/11 dread. Despite its authorial talent, this thing is a complete slog, occasionally enlivened by bursts of explosive (but not particularly atmospheric) violence. The vampires have a neat biology, but most of that seems left over from del Toro's own Blade 2. For a project born as a TV show, you can practically feel the commercial breaks. But for all its clunky faults, it's got me hooked. Next year, I'm sure I'll grab part two.

If you want your horror story to be more highbrow, there's poet Laurie Sheck's meta-fictional debut novel A Monster's Notes (Knopf, $28). It comes in the form of notes from one of Frankenstein author Mary Shelley's stepsisters to Shelley, from Shelley to her mother (feminist author Mary Wollstonecraft) and between two characters in Frankenstein. This is interwoven with a portrayal of the Frankenstein creature as a real-world monster who inspired Shelley's book and who's now a depressed 21st-century denizen of New York City, musing on pretty much anything.

It's the kind of book that made me feel dumber and had me constantly Googling all the arcane historical and literary references. The lyricism that informs Sheck's poetry is on display in a grand scale, and the plot doesn't move forward as much as it wafts, but the payoff is worth it.

For a more traditional horror show, look no further than Dracula the Un-dead (Dutton, $25.95), co-written by Ian Holt and Dacre Stoker, the great-grandnephew of Dracula author Bram Stoker. Picking up the book, I wasn't sure what it was. It could have been a put-on. But it turns out that it is an actual sequel to the classic book. Even more shocking, it's not half bad.

This new Dracula takes place 25 years after the events of the original. The villain this time around isn't Dracula, but Elizabeth Bathory, the Hungarian countess infamous for bathing in virgin blood. Bathory takes on the original book's vampire hunters, who have aged and matured in different ways. (Jonathan Harker is a philanderer, Jack Seward is an opium addict, etc.) The book is springy and fun, with a crackling, page-turning pace. But, you're drawn out of the book by anachronistic flourishes and unnecessary historical shout-outs (which are easier to decode than in Sheck's).

2009 has also brought Universal Studios Monsters: A Legacy of Horror (Universe, $40) by Michael Mallory, a gorgeous coffee table book with a surprising amount of gripping content. It covers the golden years of Universal Studios horror movies, which defined the nightmares of entire generations. Giving equal part to on-screen and behind-the-scenes happenings, Mallory paints a vivid and thorough picture of the studio's horror heyday and decline, complete with gorgeous full-page photos and artwork.