Four horror reads off the beaten path
Horror crosses human boundaries in a way other works of fiction struggle with. Humor, for instance, is notoriously difficult to translate, as the comedic power of wordplay doesn’t always work across cultures, and nothing kills a joke more than the expository annotations required to bridge the gap. Horror, on the other hand, is often improved with confusion and doubt. In the words of genre pioneer and master H.P. Lovecraft, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”
The frightening shadow play of the unfamiliar against the routine patterns of our lives is an induction point that allows alien malignancies to incubate within us hitherto unknown sensations. Why this is such an attractive experience to so many people around the world is certainly up for debate, but I suspect it has something to do with an admixture of the kind of trashy voyeurism that causes rubbernecking around brutal accidents and the idea of a controlled dose of something unimaginably bad vaccinating us against our own imagined scenarios of doom.
In that spirit, I have come up with four horror fiction recommendations with hopefully novel themes and backgrounds, and the potential to creep you out. This is an R and sometimes X-rated list of transgressive biblio-nasties for those of you wishing to test yourselves on the crucible of the strange. My own tastes aren’t necessarily reflected here, and some of the passages in at least one of these books really challenged me, which is kind of the point. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Enjoy at your own risk.
Released in 2018 to a decent amount of hype from dedicated genre fans, The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch is a murder mystery on the edge of a massive cosmic horror concerning body horror, time-travel and the possible extinction of all known reality. For fans of work where the lines between a procedural murder investigation blur with high-concept, hard science fiction, this one is a must read. A lot of comparisons have been made in other reviews to series like The X-Files, True Detective and the Andrei Tarkovsky film Solaris (2002) — fair comparisons I won’t quibble with. I’d only add that another good reference point might be the often overlooked 1997 space horror movie Event Horizon, but this book exists on its own terms, and will surprise and terrorize the reader from quite a few unusual angles.
I’ve never been onboard with the term “magical realism,” at least as it is practiced as a genre describer in this current era. While it can be argued the umbrella term once had a more useful and precise application, too often it’s a lazy shorthand way to discuss fiction from other, non-North American cultures with a dismissive sort of colonial paternalism. Most works of weird fiction contain some element that could be described as magic, just as all cultures have elements of the supernatural within their artistic genealogy. I’m interested in the way certain authors from other cultures tap into that unique history while creating something that can be appreciated by people everywhere. One of the best to exemplify this ability recently is the Nigerian British author Nuzo Onoh. Her 2014 collection of horror stories The Reluctant Dead is a masterwork that draws inspiration from Nigeria’s landscape of a modern post-colonial economy transposed over a living history of Christian missionaries, tribal social orders and taboos. This is a collection of African horror stories told through a contemporary lens, which leaves the impression that every road teeming with expensive western autos is a thin line against a wilderness of unquiet souls, both living and dead. For lovers of excellent short-form horror, this is it.
A book I will always recommend because of the casual visions of extreme violence married to the point of view of one of modern fiction’s most truly unique protagonists is The Wasp Factory, the 1984 debut of the late Scottish master Iain Banks. Often known more for his science fiction offerings under the name Iain M. Banks, The Wasp Factory plays a sleight of hand trick on the reader by rendering the extreme isolation of the narrator and his shocking relationship with a childhood full of calculated, fatal violence into a post-punk horror story that is just a squinting glance away from a story about an alien being from another world. There’s even a mad scientist in the form of a detached father harboring a terrible secret. This book is rough and pure in its hallucinogenic cruelty, and I’ve gifted it to a few people to see if they can endure it as a crucible of our developing friendship. We’re all a little monstrous inside, I suppose.
Finally, the most recent offering on this list is a book with which I have nearly nothing in common but felt compelled to include for those of you out there who, like myself, don’t always read for comfort, but for the challenge and rewards that can come after such a trial. Gretchen Felker-Martin’s 2022 Manhunt had a lot of those challenges for me, including graphic depictions of genital mutilation and sex that I tend to avoid in my usual reading routine. So heads-up about that. However, the story is an absolute burner and a delight, following the survival path of two trans women living in a nightmare world where all men and people with high testosterone levels have turned into feral packs of insane hunters. The surviving women in this world are led by militarized killers who are remorseless in their disposal of anyone with any lingering, vestigial aspects of manhood. Our protagonists are caught between lethal forces and trying to survive and nourish love in an apocalypse with superfund levels of contamination from the absurd. Something about that absurdity in this story feels perfectly in tune with the base and shocking degradation of our current dystopia, so cheers to that. Enjoy at your own risk — the warning in the intro goes extra hard here.
Collin Yeo (he/him) reads all kinds of stuff but horror has been his buddy since he got his first library card.
This article appears in Halloween.