By Jon Blandford, Ph.D.  

 

The leaves have turned, the mornings and evenings are colder and darker, pumpkins have been carved and smashed. In short, now is the perfect season to turn our attention to the horror genre. 

 

As with last issue’s sci-fi recommendations, I’ll admit upfront that horror isn’t my area of expertise. I am fascinated, though, by how tales of the macabre speak to our collective anxieties and fears, and by how boogeymen like vampires and zombies mutate and evolve within new historical moments and cultural contexts. 

 

Like crime literature, which we covered a few issues back, horror remains enduringly popular. My hunch is there’s more to that popularity than simply morbid curiosity—at least, I hope so, because I have read a bunch of it, and I don’t want you to think I am some sort of weirdo.      

 

Here are some recent books I think are worth your time, and if any of it keeps you up at night, well, caveat lector.                       

 

A Headful of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay (2015) updates the demonic-possession subgenre with a story about a cash-strapped family who attempt to cure their deeply troubled, possibly demonically possessed teenage daughter by inviting a priest to perform an exorcism and a reality TV crew to film it. Part of the story is told through an interview with the now-grown younger sister of the possibly possessed girl, and part of it through horror-blog commentary about the reality TV show. Unlike William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist—which comes down pretty squarely on the side of “Yes, the devil is real, and is currently inhabiting the body of this pea soup-spewing little girl,” A Headful of Ghosts dwells in more ambiguous territory, never quite answering the question of whether its troubled girl is in fact possessed and delivering a whopper of a twist ending that forces you to re-examine everything you have just read.              

 

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (2020) transplants the spooky old house story to mid-20th century Mexico, refurbishing its haunted interiors with a smart critique of economic imperialism and monstrous patriarchal authority. The novel imports a number of familiar elements from books and stories you’ve probably read—a mist-enshrouded cemetery that recalls the moors in Wuthering Heights; wallpaper that seems to be moving and a woman confined to her bedroom, a la Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper; and a scene in which the characters make their way through a mold-encrusted catacomb that bears more than a passing resemblance to the one in Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado—but features enough ideas of its own to keep things fresh (or at least as fresh as things can be in a decaying manor). If you happen to suffer from mycophobia (that would be “fear of mushrooms”), I would avoid this book at all costs. Otherwise, this definitely deserves a few evenings of your time. 

 

The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgaard (2021) is hard to describe, as it is less a conventional novel than a series of loosely connected vignettes about a group of characters who bear witness to an unexplained new star. All sorts of strange, vaguely portentous things coincide with the appearance of this new star: a country road is overrun by thousands of crabs, a nurse at a psychiatric hospital discovers a terrifying presence in the woods when chasing an escaped patient, a minister runs into a man who looks exactly like someone whose funeral service she just conducted, a dead man’s heart starts beating after his doctors take him off life support. Knausgaard first achieved literary notoriety with a six-volume (!) series of autobiographical novels, and while that is exactly the kind of thing I do not have the patience for, he obviously knows his way around the darker parts of the human psyche: This is one heck of a creepy book.                           

 

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones (2020) follows four American Indians who are in turn followed by a vengeful spirit they unleash during an elk hunt that goes horribly awry. Jones, a member of the Blackfeet Nation, weaves into this macabre, atmospheric tale lots of sharp-eyed observations about the lives of contemporary American Indian men, and also a surprising amount of really good writing about basketball. My only complaint here is that Jones’ adherence to slasher-movie plotting means that his characters, who are fully realized, three-dimensional human beings rather than chainsaw fodder, don’t always stick around as long as you might want them to. The descriptions of violence in The Only Good Indians are more graphic than anything else on this list, and there are a couple of descriptions of violence against women early on that I found particularly upsetting. If you can stomach that gore, though, this is a smart book that will stay with you for a while.            

 

Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti (published by Penguin Classics in 2015) brings together the first two collections of stories from the celebrated cult writer. Celebrated though he may be, I have had a hard time getting into Ligotti, as his combination of relentlessly grim and abstractly philosophical just isn’t for me. So why am I recommending it? Because “Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story” is one of the scariest things I have ever read, full stop. Beginning as an essay about how to write horror in different styles, it soon sloughs off this metafictional conceit and becomes something genuinely terrifying. Go ahead and read the rest of Ligotti’s work and tell me I am wrong about his genius, as Class of 2020 Bellarmine Honors grad Satchel Smith did, but either way, know that “Notes on the Writing of Horror” alone is arguably worth the price of admission.                 

 

The Changeling by Vincent LaValle (2017) does for the grimmer parts of the Brothers Grimm what his earlier novel The Ballad of Black Tom did for H.P. Lovecraft, turning well-worn horror and fantasy tropes inside out to reveal important new insights. LaValle is as good a writer as anyone on this list, and this story of a first-generation immigrant whose fairy-tale marriage becomes a nightmare is equal parts magical, horrifying, heartbreaking and imbued with hope for a better future in which we can slay the monsters from the past that still rear their ugly heads in the present day. You will read this one in a few nights for sure.                

 

The Outsider by Stephen King (2018) was made into an HBO series, but we are way behind on TV in my house so you’ll need to look elsewhere for a review of that. I hesitated to included King on this list, both because everyone reading this knows him and because his recent work has ranged in quality from surprisingly good (2006’s Lisey’s Story, 2010’s Full Dark, No Stars) to surprisingly terrible and I did not finish it (2006’s Cell). The Outsider falls somewhere in between. It’s absolutely riveting for its first half in its portrait of a wrongly accused murderer and a police detective whose initial convictions turn to doubt, but it goes off the rails a bit when it introduces the inevitable supernatural elements and a recurring character that King seems to think is a lot more interesting than I do. Still, it is amazing that King, who is approximately 8,000 novels into his career and probably dashed off another one while I was working on this paragraph, is still this good.             

 

Devil House by John Darnielle (2022) is not a horror novel per se, but it does have more than its share of shocking moments and the word “devil” is in the title, so I am including it. The story of a writer who moves into a building where a notorious multiple murder took place to get closer to the subject of his next book, Devil House deconstructs the true-crime genre, repeatedly setting up our expectations and then subverting them by approaching the same story from different perspectives and with new information. In the end, it's a novel about the inadequacy of the narratives we use to make meaning of real-life horror and violence, and how our assumptions about who does such things and why inevitably limit our perspectives.