The big Apple was dropped last week. Now its time to drop the candy corn. For the next 40 days we will be swan diving into Halloween Season. As such, all things horror will be discussed. Nothing is off the table: film, music, fiction, true crime. Today we're going into horror fiction.
Horror fiction has been on a glorious resurgence in the past twenty years. This post aims to highlight that along with some of th other authors who have not gotten enough of a spotlight compared to the ones you'd find sitting on a shelf at Barnes and Noble. Sure we've read our share of Lovecraft, Stephen King, Shirley Jackson and Clive Barker. They are masters of the form for a reason.
Here are the children who were kept up late at night and reading The Haunting of Hill House and Carrie and The Colour From Outer Space and decided "I want to do that."
NOVELS
The Fisherman by John Langan
A novel of grief and eldrich gods. The Fisherman taps into a horrifying what if scenario: would you trade the bond you made with your best friend for the chance to see people in your life again who have been dead for years.
House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski
I feel obligated to include this one even though it is fairly popular. A book whose prose takes on the form of the house you are reading about. It expands, contracts. Words run off the page. It's about as immersive a narrative one can get from a book.
Off Season by Jack Ketchum
By far the grisliest book on this list. If its blood you've come for, look no further than this tale of feral cannibals.
The Elementals by Michael McDowell
The screenwriter of Beetlejuice got his start as a novelist writing horror paperbacks. His books delve into the Southern Gothic Horror genre. Imagine Barbara Maitland opening the door to the desert filled alternate world but instead of sandworms you have three houses built next to each other with the third one slowly being swallowed by the sand. Oh yeah, there's also specters among them. Stephen King called McDowell the finest writer of paperback originals in America. This book is proof of that.
Hell Hound by Ken Greenhall
Another book I discovered from Grady Hendrix's Paperbacks From Hell. It is told from the perspective of a dog named Baxter, a sociopathic bull terrier. How could you not be interested after hearing that premise?
A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay
The demonic possession genre is responsible for one of the scariest movies in horror: The Exorcist. It's the benchmark of not just that subgenre but what many consider for the horror genre itself. Paul Tremblay breathes new life into the subgenre by posing a terrifying question: what if the little girl possessed is really just suffering from mental illness. He then goes further: what happens if said mental illness is exploited by reality television? This one genuinely scared me.
Experimental Film by Gemma Files
Film, especially silent film is something that endlessly fascinates me. Cosmic forces trying to worm their way into our universe via lost Canadian film.
Mongrels by Stephen Graham Jones
A coming of age story where the narrator is born into a family of werewolves. Each chapter feels like a stand alone vignette which makes for a great reading experience.
The Cipher by Kathe Koja
"Nicholas is a would be poet and video store clerk with a weeping hole in his hand- weeping not blood, but a plasma of tears..." I heard about this through Grady Hendrix's Paperbacks From Hell. This opening synopsis of the book instantly put its hooks in me as a book I had to read. Reading was being witness to the unraveling of the human psyche. Koja's characters are unlikable, letting their base desires drive them without much hesitation or regret.
NOVELLAS
A Lush and Seething Hell by John Horner Jacobs
"A mix between Roberto Bolano and HP Lovecraft" is the kind of blurb to put on a book if you want to make me blind buy it. Jacobs takes cosmic horror and Latin American dictatorship and combines the two into story called The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky that continually made me say in my head "I wish I thought of this." The second story, My Heart Struck Sorrow deals with a librarian discovering a recording from the Deep South which may be the stylings of the Devil himself.
SHORT STORIES
The velocity of a short story is something I continue to turn to when I need a quick emotional punch. A jolt to the system.
Teatro Grottesco by Thomas Ligotti
This might be my favorite collection on this list, so I put it at the top. Grotesque factories, warped towns, clowns, puppets and half glimpsed horrors abound in these stories. Ligotti even touches on corporate horror in the story "Our Temporary Supervisor." Don't expect conventional horror. This is atmosphere and dread from a writer whose nihilistic worldview has become the influence of True Detective's Rust Cohle.
Also check out: Songs of A Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe
North American Lake Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud
Ballingrud's stories pack an emotional punch with no sentimentality to be found. The horror happens around the margins. These stories are more focused on fears of the social outcast and the people who struggle to maintain relationships.
The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All by Laird Barron
If you enjoyed the hard boiled noir aspects of True Detective and wanted it to delve even further into its cosmic horror leanings, this should be at the top of your reading list. Blackwoods Baby and The Men From Porlock are two of my favorite short stories and both are contained in this collection. If you love this and want to know where to go next, check out his other two cosmic horror collections The Imago Sequence and Occultation.
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
Fairy tales with a macabre, twisted bent to them. It's blend of sex and gothic horror is close to perfect.
Things We Lost In the Fire by Mariana Enriquez
The darkest corners of South America and the human mind are explored in this collection. Tales shift from psychological to Lovecraftian.
A Collapse of Horses by Brian Evenson
Coffee House Press put out a bunch of Evenson's work and I recommend all of it. If you need something to start with, his short story collections A Collapse of Horses and Song For the Unraveling of the World are tough to beat. If you like your horror existential, bleak, bizarre and filled with disquieting, Kafkaesque weirdness, Evenson's fiction is the place to go to.
We Live Inside You by Jeremy Robert Johnson
When Susurrus Stirs is a story that continues to haunt me. Parasites, body horror, and darkly comic tales that get under the skin.
Furnace by Livia Llewelyn
Erotically charged stories of the ultra strange. Sumptuous prose and unsettling dream logic.
Revenge by Yoko Ogawa
While this isn't full on horror, there are stories in here that stack up to any eeriness gleaned from more straightforward genre fiction.
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