Horror movies have a capacity to scare that seems almost unfairly powerful. Even a bad horror movie — an underwritten slasher, a lazy creature feature, a predictable serial killer thriller — can disturb you with a smash cut to gruesome violence or a montage of shocking imagery. That’s what makes horror movies, like roller coasters, so much fun: They might make you vomit, or even pass out, but it’s scarily good fun to go along for the ride.
Horror novels are a different proposition. To truly scare a reader, a book must weave a more delicate web of persuasion and misdirection, depending on the power of your imagination to fill in the most chilling details. No disrespect to beloved classics like “Frankenstein” or “Dracula,” but in this modern era of on-screen terrors, it can be hard for even the greatest works of literary horror to send rivulets of sweat down your spine.
There are some books, however, that manage to unsettle, provoke and frighten as capably as any movie. These books work on the imagination slowly and deliberately, building an atmosphere of menace that can be difficult to shake. It’s a different category of fear than what’s conjured by your average horror movie: subtler and more insidious, less grisly and lurid, dominated by psychological terror and a sense of foreboding that often supersedes the spectacle of graphic violence. When done masterfully, a great horror read can haunt you long after you turn the final page.
As Halloween approaches, here are some genuinely terrifying books guaranteed to keep you up at night. These are more than simply good reads: They will freak you out.
Night Shift
By Stephen King
King has written no shortage of great horror novels and many of his classics — “It,” “The Stand,” “Pet Sematary” — are apt to raise a few goose bumps. But it’s his inaugural collection of short stories, “Night Shift,” that is perhaps his most purely terrifying work. The concision of a short story makes it an ideal format for unrelenting scares: Standouts include “The Mangler,” the gut-lurching tale of an industrial laundry machine with a mind of its own, and “Graveyard Shift,” the creepy-crawly story of a rat infestation at a textile mill in Maine.
House of Leaves
By Mark Z. Danielewski
An arch, quasi-academic story about a lost documentary film and its critical meaning may not seem to have the makings of a masterpiece of horror — even if the documentary in question is about a haunted house. But despite its esoteric style and a daunting page count that puts it closer to “Infinite Jest” than Edgar Allan Poe, “House of Leaves” is a strange and beguiling novel. Reading it is a profoundly unsettling experience: It’s also, as The Times wrote in its 2000 review, “funny, moving, sexy, beautifully told.”
The Andromeda Strain
By Michael Crichton
This riveting 1969 techno-thriller, in which a military satellite returns to earth contaminated with an extremely contagious extraterrestrial virus, has gained a bit of unfortunate contemporary resonance in the decades since Crichton wrote it. The novel’s sober tone and almost absurdly dry prose style — it is written in the form of a classified government memorandum, replete with illustrated charts and diagrams — make this story of a near-apocalyptic pandemic feel bracingly realistic.
The Perfect Nanny
By Leila Slimani; translated by Sam Taylor
Slimani’s bleak and stylish second novel — released in France under its more lyrical original title, “Chanson Douce” (“Sweet Song”) — was loosely inspired by the real-life killing of two young children by their au pair in Manhattan in 2012. But this is no mere ripped-from-the-headlines airport paperback: “The Perfect Nanny” is a tough book about a grim subject, staring down the hard truth of this monstrous incident with clarity and conviction. Its power leaps out from the unforgettable opening sentence: “The baby is dead.” No sentiment, no sensationalism: pure horror.
Red Dragon
By Thomas Harris
The exploits of Dr. Hannibal Lecter have been adapted for the screen so many times, and to such celebrated effect, that it’s easy to forget his first appearance: as a minor character in Harris’s crime thriller “Red Dragon.” When the F.B.I. profiler Will Graham is flummoxed in his pursuit of the enigmatic serial killer Francis Dolarhyde, whom the tabloids have nicknamed “the Tooth Fairy,” he finds himself forced to turn to an unlikely source for advice: Lecter, the cannibalistic psychiatrist Graham captured five years before the events of the book. Lecter is memorable here, but more compelling still is Harris’s peerless command of tone as he depicts brutal acts of evil.
The Haunting of Hill House
By Shirley Jackson
“Hill House is vile, it is diseased; get away from here at once,” an eerie premonition warns the narrator early in Jackson’s immortal classic. This novel’s stature as something like the thinking reader’s ghost story — The Times, in its review, called it “caviar for the connoisseurs of the cryptic” — tends to obscure the fact that it’s also seriously scary. From the first pages, when Eleanor Vance accepts an invitation from Dr. John Montague to join him at Hill House for the summer and conduct a scientific investigation of paranormal phenomena, the book is suffused with a sense of mounting dread. This is one haunted house you’ll never forget.
The Turn of the Screw
By Henry James
Whether this beloved 19th-century novella retains the power to frighten you depends on the degree to which you’ve ever questioned your own senses or doubted your sanity — and since we’ve nearly all had at least some experience with that feeling, it’s hardly surprising that modern readers continue to find James’s book remarkably vivid and disquieting. The tale of an ill-fated English governess and the spirits who may or may not be haunting the country manor where she is employed is a classic of Gothic literature, prized for its ambiguity and sophistication.
The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories
By Horacio Quiroga; translated by Margaret Sayers Peden
The intensely disturbing title story of this collection by Quiroga, a Uruguayan playwright and poet, is a master class in terror by suggestion. The “four idiot sons of the couple Mazzini-Ferraz” simply sit, observe and lurk — until they are moved to an act of terrible violence, implied but never actually described, that will be lodged in your brain forever. Quiroga’s chilly, unsentimental style makes the horror all the more pronounced: It’s his restraint, leaving us to imagine the worst, that elevates his work to greatness.
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