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If you’re looking to spruce up your pad with some ghoulish hand-made Halloween decorations these books can help get the juices flowing.

I’ve curated 10 of the best Halloween books for carving jack-o-lanterns, baking spooky treats, and haunting up your house with creepy-crawly decorating ideas.

Extreme Halloween: The Ultimate Guide to Making Halloween Scary Again

Extreme Halloween covers a little bit of everything with advice on baking, costumes, garage styling and putting out candy for trick-or-treaters.

This book is full of some really cool projects for your yard and interior. Many of these you can even do with your kids for some Halloween fun. You’ll learn how to throw crazy Halloween parties and create your own decorations on a budget.

It is a fairly small read only totaling 100 pages long. But the content is phenomenal and it’s well worth picking up if you’re new to custom decorations.

Each chapter has a bunch of projects broken down by section including required time to complete and required materials. This way you can plan ahead to decide what you want to make and how you’ll add those decorations to spruce up your space.

A Ghostly Good Time: The Family Halloween Handbook

This arts & crafts book is fun for the whole family and offers a lot of cool projects for all ages. A Ghostly Good Time shares home recipes, crafts, and decorating ideas to get your house looking spiffy for the season.

Over 128 pages you’ll find a bunch of different projects for yourself and your kids. The book splits these projects into 4 sections:

Halloween headquarters(decorating) Dressed to thrill(costumes) Little workshop of horrors(crafts) Devilish delights(snacks & treats)

What’s nice about this book is how it pushes the Halloween style without going too scary. It’s perfect for little kids who want the house to feel spooky but not full of realistic ghosts or frightening pop-up creatures.

When it comes to children this is the best Halloween decorating book for families of all sizes.

Halloween Decorating Idea Book 3

Idea books can help build your mental library full of ideas for you home. The Halloween Decorating Idea Book offers tons of fun concepts, decorations, and crafts you can attempt to add into your Halloween experience.

This isn’t a how-to book so it probably won’t encourage much attention from people who love decorating. Instead this is a visual book where you’ll find tons of neat ideas for your home.

One qualm I have is the length. It only has about 50 pages which feels short. But the pages are very large and they feature beautiful photography.

Each page includes a description of the item and some of the materials used. You’ll have to use your own DIY nature to recreate them in your home.

At the very least this book makes a fun coffee table piece for autumn to get your home in the mood with funky Halloween decor photos.

Spooky & Bright: 101 Halloween Ideas

For a much more hands-on approach to decorating you might like Spooky & Bright: 101 Halloween Ideas. This book is published by Country Living which is a popular site for everything on decorating & crafts.

These crafts are some of the coolest things with spooky ghost lollipops, spider candy apples, and fun lanterns made with LEDs.

If you’d prefer free alternatives you can always search in Google looking for Halloween ideas. But the beauty of this book is how it brings all the ideas to you. It has stuff you never would’ve thought of and it’ll help you build a richer decorating library.

Plus this book is uber cheap so it’s a worthy companion for the Halloween season.

It’s especially great if you have kids that love baking, crafts, and other home activities. Kids will often prove to be your best helpers!

Pumpkin Stencils: 18 Funny & Spooky Faces

Who could decorate for Halloween without a pumpkin? These designs are a staple for any home and the book Pumpkin Stencils offers plenty of variety for carving.

This book comes with 18 unique stencils and some how-to guides to help you carve the perfect face. Each stencil can be photocopied to be reused over and over, or you can buy multiple packs of this book to have extras for next year.

You can find tons of pumpkin stencil packs and they’re all magnificent. These faces are super easy to carve and you can get them done in one afternoon to be ready for Halloween.

The only extra stuff you’ll need is a carving kit and a few ripe orange pumpkins to carve up.

Felt-o-ween: 40 Scary-Cute Projects to Celebrate Halloween

If you love making custom decorations then be sure to nab a copy of Felt-o-ween: 40 Scary-Cute Projects to Celebrate Halloween.

This book celebrates the fun nature of Halloween with 40+ projects you can follow and create using felt. Each project is tailor-made for beginners and you won’t need to do any stitching(for the most part).

Projects include little candy dishes, table ornaments, plushes, wreaths, and trick-or-treat bags. Early chapters cover felt in detail explaining how it works and how you can use it to create awesome knick-knacks from scratch.

Whether you’re a felt expert or if you’ve never made a craft in your life this book can teach you to make fun decorations for the Halloween season.

Matthew Mead’s Halloween Spooktacular

This massive 256 page tome of Halloween decorating tips is the ultimate guide for any homeowner. Matthew Mead’s Halloween Spooktacular shares quick & easy projects you can do with few materials that don’t cost much money.

Early chapters talk about the basics like jack-o-lanterns and simple hanging decorations. But as you move through the book you’ll find more diverse projects like Halloween baked goods, fun backyard games, and custom outfits for your pets.

None of these projects feel cheap or gimmicky and they’re great for kids. The baking projects also come out delicious with treats ranging from donuts to homemade cakes.

Everything in this book is so fun and it just oozes the Halloween spirit. If you’re big into home crafts then you owe it to yourself to grab a copy of this book.

Creating Your Vintage Hallowe’en

In the 19th century Halloween was celebrated in a different manner. These traditions have changed with modern times but they’re well worth remembering and passing onto new generations.

That’s the goal of Creating Your Vintage Hallowe’en by Marion Paull. Her book shares a brief history of Halloween and how it was regarded in decades past.

But this is far from a history book. It has dozens of awesome projects ranging from costumes to party decorations for your home. You’ll also learn how jack-o-lanterns were originally carved and how you can mimic this old-school design work in your own home.

Classic Halloween traditions have been around for centuries and this book is a living embodiment of the best ones that can come back to life in your home.

How To Haunt Your House

Some people like a truly terrifying Halloween experience. These are usually the people with houses that kids fear to approach, but there’s no denying they sure do love Halloween.

In the book How To Haunt Your House you’ll find dozens of projects you can follow to make your home genuinely frightening. These projects have multiple parts with aesthetics like fog machines, fake spider webs, and mummies/skeletons that look quite real.

Many of these projects come from ideas for actual haunted houses. If you want to create a realistic haunted house experience then be sure to grab a copy of this book.

Some of these things are so scary you might be afraid to enter your own house at night!

Best of Halloween Tricks & Treats

For a much lighter touch have a look at Best of Halloween Tricks & Treats. This book is primarily a cooking book spanning 200 pages of recipes that taste great and look even better.

You’ll find tons of cool projects in here teaching you how to make costumes, party favors, and decorations to spruce up your home. All projects are kid-friendly so you can spend some quality time designing the house the way they like it.

Recipes include mummy cupcakes and baked goods like cookies/cakes with a spooky slant. Plus you’ll find tons of cutout art templates for making decorations and whimsical patterns for pumpkins.

This book is absolutely packed to the brim with fun projects to delight everyone in the family. It’s also a great party book if you don’t have kids but want to throw a smashing Halloween bash.

Ghoulish Goodies

This all-Halloween cookbook is the perfect gift for any chef or family looking for some seasonal treats. Ghoulish Goodies shares 70 ghastly gourmet recipes for any food or drink you can imagine.

Early chapters cover the basic sweets like candies, cookies, and cakes. But later chapters get into smaller dishes for party foods and even drinks like stylized soda pop & party punch.

From spooky pancakes to monster eyeball chocolates, you’ll find a grab bag of awesome ideas in this book. All the recipes are super easy to make and they’re perfect for baking with your kids(approved recipes for kids ages 3-12).

At such a great price and with so many realistic recipes I can’t think of a better culinary resource for Halloween treats.

But all the books in this post bring something unique and different to the party. Take another look over this list and see if anything catches your eye.