October’s paperbacks are primed for the darkening nights with a creeping fascination ranging from the unsettling to the spectral, the ghostly to horrors unimaginable. It is sometimes hard to know what might fit this brief for a reader.

It was not that long ago that a regular customer returned a book by a male nature writer to our bookshop on the basis that the first chapter had made them just too uneasy, with their sense that the author might have a particularly bad aura. We good naturedly allowed them to exchange for something that promised to be more satisfying, and trusted their reading, although had little practical use for their feedback. Nevertheless, bookshops are frequently the book trade’s frontline for readers’ thoughts, feelings and reactions, and never more so than when a book or an author is receiving particular scrutiny.

It seems odd that in such a climate, publishers seldom engage with bookshops to discuss their frontline role, which always goes beyond the transactional function of showroom for publishers’ wares. With the upswing in femgore amid the more visceral horror, it will be interesting to see how the increased marketing of horror meets our readers’ expectations.

Folk horror aficionados will appreciate the return of Andrew Michael Hurley with the Northern epic Barrowbeck (John Murray), while Daisy Johnson’s The Hotel (Vintage) and Adam Macqueen’s Haunted Tales (Swift Press) also present immersive home-grown unease. For a lighter non-fiction approach to the ghostly, Daisy May Cooper’s Hexy Witch (Radar) should hit home.

Crime and thrillers are also abundant this month, ranging from the suspenseful and comic in Kristen Perrin’s How to Seal Your Own Fate (Quercus) and Oskar Jensen’s Helle’s Hound (Viper) to the darker happenings in Barbara Nadel’s The East Ham Golem (Allison & Busby) and Shizuko Natsuki’s classic Murder at Mount Fuji (Penguin). Natsuki’s translator, Robert B Rohmer, also worked on the English translation of Koji Suzuki’s cult horror Ring (HarperCollins), which feels apt for the season.

Non-fiction submissions for October are dominated by biography and memoir and history, politics and current affairs, often overlapping in their concerns. Leigh Turner’s Lessons in Diplomacy: Politics, Power and Parties (Policy Press) explores the human side of politics, using personal experience to unpack the invisible work ambassadors and diplomats do to further national interest. Edwidge Danticat’s We’re Alone (riverrun) and Jhalak Prize winner NS Nuseibeh’s Namesake: Reflections on a Warrior Woman (Canongate Books) both showcase how essays can build complex portraits of the politics of home. Historic royalty and aristocracy are also well-served by biography, in Helen Castor’s The Eagle and the Hart (Penguin), Tim Blanning’s Augustus the Strong (Penguin) and Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s The Scapegoat (Fourth Estate).

Reissues of note this month include short fiction with Celia Fremlin’s By Horror Haunted (Faber), published in a zingy yellow and black corvid cover, and Edward Parnell’s selection of classic weird fiction from the fairground, All the Fear of the Fair, the latest entry in the British Library’s popular Tales of the Weird Series.

My Book of the Month, Rosalind Ashe’s Moths, is one of five titles reissued for Penguin Horror, a collection celebrating the “very best literary horror… terrifying novels and tales that for generations have thrilled, captivated and kept readers wide awake at night”. These should mirror the appeal of Penguin Weird Fiction, which launched last October.

New cover looks and anniversary editions aplenty will tempt readers, too, with Naomi Novik’s fantasy-hit Uprooted (Tor), Elif Shafak’s redesigned backlist for Penguin and the 25th-anniversary edition of Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin (Virago) all appealing. A special word should also be said for the accessibility work in Head of Zeus’ dyslexia-friendly reissues of popular fiction, including Mona Awad’s Bunny (Head of Zeus), Elodie Harper’s The Wolf Den (Apollo) and Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem (Head of Zeus).