Google has created a Google Doodle (embedded above) in honor of the 165th birthday of the great horror novelist Bram Stoker.

To celebrate the milestone, we’ve rounded up free eBooks you can download download right now for your eReader, smartphone or tablet. Follow the links below to read.

Follow these links to explore more free eBooks at Project Gutenberg: our massive Free eBook Flowchart, our Free Books for Halloween collection, our Free Herman Melville books list, our Free Edgar Allan Poe books collection, our Downton Abbey poetry reading list and our Free Books That Inspired David Foster Wallace list and Free Books Neil deGrasse Tyson Thinks Everybody Should Read.

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As Hurricane Sandy swept through New Jersey, Halloween celebrations were moved to November 5th. To celebrate, we are re-running 25 free horror books that you can download right now for your eReader, smartphone or tablet. Follow the links below to read.

If you want to help with hurricane relief, you can donate money to Red Cross disaster relief right now. You can also make an appointment to donate blood to the Red Cross.

In 2010, novelist Neil Gaiman created the “All Hallow’s Read,” literary holiday, a night to give someone you love a scary book. The writer explained the new tradition in the video embedded above–here’s more from the official site:

Obviously, we support bookshops and authors, but more than that, this is about making a holiday tradition of book-giving. So feel free to give second-hand books or books from your own shelves. And feel just as free to buy a beautiful new book from a small independent bookseller, or from online or… look, there’s no wrong way to buy a book. You can even gift it to their Kindle … If you do not know what scary book to give someone, talk to a bookseller or a librarian. They like to help. Librarians will not mind even if you admit that you are not planning to take out a book, but instead you are going to buy one and give it to someone.

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What’s your favorite kind of book? We’ve created a giant flowchart to help you browse the top 50 free eBooks at Project Gutenberg.

Click the image above to see a larger version of the book map. Your choices range from Charles Dickens to Jane Austen, from Sherlock Holmes to needlework. Below, we’ve linked to all 50 free eBooks so you can start downloading right now. The books are available in all major eBook formats.

Follow this link to see an online version of the flowchart, complete with links to the the individual books.

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Author Ian Holt wrote a sequel to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Dracula the Un-Dead) alongside Stoker’s great-grand nephew,  Dacre Stoker. Holt also serves as writer and producer for the supernatural thriller film, Episode 50. We  caught up with this vampire expert just in time for Halloween.

Q: Why are vampires portrayed as sexy monsters?

A: That was just a happy accident. As written, Bram’s character of Count Dracula was old, he smelled like the grave, he had hair on his palms and the facial features of a rodent. Bram’s Count Dracula was not at all sexy.

It was not until Bela Lugosi was cast that the play and the book became the mega-success we all know it as today. Bela came to England from Hungary where had just completed a hugely successful run as Romeo in Shakespeare’s Romeo And Juliet. His good looks made him a national sex symbol and his erotically charged performance as Romeo had women swooning in the aisles.

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In an age of digital press releases and paperless publicity, Vintage Books has released this coffin-shaped release to support Otto Penzler‘s paperback original, “The Vampire Archives.”

Next week media types around the country will receive copies of the cardboard cutouts and plastic glow-in-the-dark fangs to celebrate the book’s release. The creators, Vintage/Anchor’s associate director of publicity Sloane Crosley and her assistant assistant Sarah Cantor also built a tombstone release for “The Book of Dead Philosophers” by Simon Critchley.

Here’s more about the vampire anthology: “Vampires! Whether imagined by Bram Stoker or Anne Rice, they are part of the human lexicon and as old as blood itself. They are your neighbors, your friends, and they are always lurking. Now Otto Penzler–editor of the bestselling Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps–has compiled the darkest, the scariest, and by far the most evil collection of vampire stories ever.”