Putting the “boo” in books
If you think that scary movies are the only way to celebrate Halloween, the MIT Press is here to prove you wrong. Looking for paranormal stories? We’ve got it covered. The first cyborg novel? That too. A study of extraterrestrials? Of course.
Explore these books and more spooky stories below, and sign up for our newsletter to hear more nightmarish news from the Press.

The Science of Weird Shit: Why Our Minds Conjure the Paranormal by Chris French
Ghostly encounters, alien abduction, reincarnation, talking to the dead, UFO sightings, inexplicable coincidences, out-of-body and near-death experiences. Are these legitimate phenomena? If not, how should we go about understanding them? In this fascinating book, Chris French investigates paranormal claims to discover what lurks behind this “weird shit.” French provides authoritative, evidence-based explanations for a wide range of superficially mysterious phenomena, and then goes further to draw out lessons with wider applications to many other aspects of modern society where critical thinking is urgently needed.

The Clockwork Man by E.V. Odle
In 1920s England, a strange being crashes a village cricket game. After some glitchy, jerky attempts to communicate, this creature reveals that he is a machine-enhanced human from a multiverse thousands of years in the future. The mechanism implanted in his skull has malfunctioned, sending him tumbling through time onto the green grass of the cricket field. Apparently in the future, at the behest of fed-up women, all men will be controlled by an embedded “clockwork,” camouflaged with hats and wigs. Published in 1923, The Clockwork Man—the first cyborg novel—tells the story of this odd time traveler’s visit.

Extraterrestrials by Wade Roush
Everything we know about how planets form and how life arises suggests that human civilization on Earth should not be unique. We ought to see abundant evidence of extraterrestrial activity—but we don’t. Where is everybody? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, science and technology writer Wade Roush examines one of the great unsolved problems in science: is there life, intelligent or otherwise, on other planets?

Technologies of the Human Corpse by John Troyer
Death and the dead body have never been more alive in the public imagination—not least because of current debates over modern medical technology that is deployed, it seems, expressly to keep human bodies from dying, blurring the boundary between alive and dead. In this book, John Troyer examines the relationship of the dead body with technology, both material and conceptual: the physical machines, political concepts, and sovereign institutions that humans use to classify, organize, repurpose, and transform the human corpse. Doing so, he asks readers to think about death, dying, and dead bodies in radically different ways.

The Heads of Cerberus and Other Stories by Francis Stevens
When three people in Philadelphia inhale dust developed by a scientist who has discovered parallel universes, they are transported into an interdimensional no-man’s-land that is populated by supernatural beings. From there, they go on to an alternate-future version of Philadelphia—a frightening dystopian nation-state in which citizens are numbered, not named. How will they escape? In The Heads of Cerberus and Other Stories, introduced by Lisa Yaszek, you will find this world-bending story as well as five others written by Francis Stevens, the pseudonym of Gertrude Barrows Bennett, a pioneering science fiction and fantasy adventure writer from Minneapolis who made her literary debut at the precocious age of 17.

The Phantom Scientist by Robin Cousin
When physicist Stéphane Douasy arrives to occupy the vacant twenty-fourth lab at the Institute for the Study of Complex and Dynamic Systems, an ominous problem rises in his wake: what has happened to his missing neighbor in Building F? When Stéphane’s neighbors, a discouraged linguist and a computer scientist bent on predicting the future, discover that the missing researcher may have solved the P versus NP problem—a coup in computer science with revolutionary implications for everything from mathematics to philosophy—before vanishing, things turn stranger still, and even more menacing. Solving the mystery of the Institute and its devolution into mayhem and violence every seventh year quickly shifts from being an intellectual exercise to a matter of life and death.

Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds by Mary Shelley, edited by David H. Guston, Ed Finn and Jason Scott Robert
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has endured in the popular imagination for two hundred years. Begun as a ghost story by an intellectually and socially precocious eighteen-year-old author during a cold and rainy summer on the shores of Lake Geneva, the dramatic tale of Victor Frankenstein and his stitched-together creature can be read as the ultimate parable of scientific hubris. This edition pairs the original 1818 version of the manuscript—meticulously line-edited and amended by Charles E. Robinson, one of the world’s preeminent authorities on the text—with annotations and essays by leading scholars exploring the social and ethical aspects of scientific creativity raised by this remarkable story. In our era of synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, robotics, and climate engineering, this edition of Frankenstein will resonate forcefully for readers with a background or interest in science and engineering, and anyone intrigued by the fundamental questions of creativity and responsibility.