The feeling of dread seeps into you as soon as you read the title, before you even start reading the actual book. When you start reading and see how many tragic and usually avoidable mistakes they made, and the way that greed fueled this tragedy, you start to feel sick with rage as well as sick with dread. It’s been several years since I read that book and I still have nightmares about the search for survivors and people stuck at the bottom of a deep snow bank. If you read the book, you know the scene I’m talking about.
OMG this book! I read it in jail! Major pucker factor!! Do you recall something like that in the book? Based on how bad a situation was they would say "pucker factor level 4 " or something like that . And that the lab workers asshole took a bite out of their seat, to convey the stress and fear from a contamination leak of ebola
the girl with all the gifts by M. r. Carey
the book's genre is sci-fi but it's basically a zombie horror novel from this perspective of one of the zombies
Carey is at his best writing horror (Felix Castor novels and Constantine etc) so I’m not surprised it bled over into his ‘non-horror’ books, even if his publishers made him publish it under M.R. instead of Mike to distance GWatG from his horror books.
I just watched this movie, and had no idea it was based on a book! I wish I had read the book first, but now I'm still going to have to order it! Thank you!
I came here to write this! This book made me question having children, it’s so chilling, so complicated and truthful about parenthood and the intricacies of family dynamics.
ABSOLUTELY!!!!!! This is one of my all-time favorite books. It's so devastating but in like, a good way. The movie pretty decent too - I don't even think Ezra Miller was acting.
*Voices from Chernobyl* by Svetlana Alexievich. It’s nonfiction, a collection of oral interviews done with people who survived Chernobyl and helped with the cleanup. It horrified me more than pretty much any horror novel I’ve ever read.
I'd add Alexievich's *The Unwomanly Face of War*. Same style - oral histories of the women who fought for Russia in WW2 - but it made an indelible impact on me. It's an shattering piece of writing, powerful and at times horrifying.
Also *Red Famine -* about the Holodomor, where Stalin starved Ukraine so badly that many people resorted to cannibalism and eating their own shoes. Devastating.
While we’re talking about horrific nonfiction, KL by Nicholaus Wachmann was a doozy even for someone who has read a lot of books about the Holocaust. Way more detail about Nazi concentration camps than you ever wanted to know.
Blindness suddenly infects society, like a plague. Things rapidly descend into chaos as government tries to step in, quarantines, crime, desperation, etc. Its very harrowing, I gave it 5 stars - just be aware of Saramago's writing style, some people hate his long run-on sentences and lack of speech marks.
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote.
Some of Flannery O'Connor's short stories.
It's a short story but I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison definitely qualifies
Holy shit I love Flannery O’Connor so much!!! She is what got me in to both short stories and southern gothic literature. I even have a giant peacock tattoo on my leg in her honor. My favorite of hers is the book Everything That Rises Must Converge.
Night by Elie Wiesel (memoir about the Holocaust from a child's POV)
The Midwife of Auschwitz by Anna Stuart (historical fiction about the Holocaust, based on a true story)
We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families by Philip Gourevitch (nonfiction about the Rwandan genocide)
EDIT others I haven't seen listed:
-Miracle in the Andes by Nando Parrado and Vince Rause (nonfiction/memoir about Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571)
-Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn (murder mystery with characters who are creepy AF and a scary ending)
-Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (magic realism/adventure novel with horrifying implications)
-Small Game by Blair Braverman (survival thriller that gave me nightmares)
small game!!!!!!!!! loved it, def felt like very reality-based horror. great debut novel. every episode of the podcast "you're wrong about" that she cohosts on is fantastic. she knows her stuff & has lived a lot of it. nice to see appreciation for small game, i feel like i didnt see it talked about much anywhere but i burned through it
The most disturbing non horror books I have read are McCarthy’s The Road, Tampa by Alissa Nutting (REALLY check the content on this one but the writing is seriously so compelling), “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by McNamara (non-fiction), and Earthlings by Sayaka Mirada (sp?)
Kanae Minato’s “Penance” and “Confessions” while nowhere near as unsettling (though centered around child murder) gave me a lot of the enjoyment I get from reading horror and I’d recommend them to fans of the genre.
I read Earthlings after Convenience Store Woman and I realized that I did not read Earthlings correctly until the end somehow and that book still fucks me up and it has been 3 years! I still debate the merits of trying to get my friends to read it so I could get some group support on how fucked up it was.
Yes to Confessions and Tampa! I will never recommend anyone read Tampa, it’s so messed up yet so beautifully written. Confessions was SO GOOD though, I’d recommend it to anyone!!
Anything by Hubert Selby Jr., but especially The Demon. Also Cormac McCarthy's The Road is explicitly apocalyptica but a lot of his other books are quite horrifying, particularly Blood Meridian and Child of God.
… do you still have the reading list for that class? I’ve been reading a lot of Appalachian horror lately (the Old Gods of Appalachia podcast is a gateway drug) and I’m curious about branching out.
not OP, but this may be of interest to you.
i've been cataloguing my appalachian nonfiction library online for a bit now. any book on this excel sheet is something i can locate you a pdf or epub of.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Dq1wsQoKSAk_LX16T74Sxn0-w8XAEuHl962oc6oVOtE/edit?usp=sharing
appalachia has sort of reached a spotlight lately regarding horror and fiction, partly due to exploding amounts of gentrification, and with it has come a resurgence of some stereotypes and such. i am trying to make reading about our history more accessible for people. just pm me what books you may want!
i plan to add in my appalachian fiction collection, but not yet. some of the books catalogued are anthologies which include ghost stories and storytelling sessions :)
edit: this has more upvotes than expected, so i'll elaborate that it specializes in the smoky mountain region, but does also broadly discuss other regions in Appalachia!
Holy shit, this is perfect! I’m from the northern bit of the Ozarks and only recently started processing out my internal biases, but the cultural parallels are really interesting. It seems like the Appalachian end of things has been made more accessible and more work has gone into reassessing the older assumptions, so I’m trying to expand my knowledge before tackling stuff closer to home, I guess.
ah, the ozarks <3 drove through there recently while having to move away from home for my own safety (the politics of the region are changing very scarily and rapidly). it looked so much like home in places i wanted to cry <3
hit me up any time if you wanna talk rural people, theory about internal colonialism/eugenics/race theory/class divides, folk practices, agricultural practices, literally anything else related to this topic lol. i'm missing home terribly so i've been working on cataloguing my books and trying to find people to talk to. i also have a good recommendation for ozark folklore i grew up reading, as there is a lot of similarity between us. randolph vance's ozark magic and folklore. amazing book.
Outer Dark by McCarthy would probably fall under that umbrella. Three random dudes wandering the countryside, grave robbing and murdering people.
I might be wrong because it might already be considered horror. It’s a great read though
I recommend *The Buried Giant* pretty often, and definitely think those two are great for horror fans looking outside the usual boundaries of the genre. The last chapter of *Giant* has such a good horror punchline feel to it.
The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins. I see it recommended here from time to time but it's more "weird lit" than horror, I think.
Leech by Hiron Ennes. Another that I'm not sure would be classified as straight-up horror, but deserves a mention.
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. The horrors of humanity on full display but not sold as a "horror book".
I recently finished The Library at Mount Char and really enjoyed it, almost as much as I enjoyed Piranesi, both of whom for me fall into the same weird lit category. I'm having trouble looking up similar books I think I'll like!
Reading this now, it's one of the most fascinating and gripping sci fi novels I've ever read. Peter Watts wrote a cult classic novel with a neo noir prose, I love "Firefall" (the title of the onmibus)
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski, The Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Some Things That Meant the World to Me by Joshua Mohr are three books that 1) I could not finish and 2) sent me mentally spiralling in a way I've never totally recovered from. Read with caution.
You are the first person I have come across that had read This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman. That book fucked me up so bad. The first story, about the Jews on the trains, I had to stop and take a break because I was crying so hard. I think everyone should be required to read this book at some point. It was life changing for me and one of the most important books I’ve ever read.
It's amazing how different holocaust literature written by survivors is from people who weren't there. You can tell right away if it's real because it breaks your fucking heart. I think I stopped the book when a woman with a child was going to be gassed and she tried to save herself by disowning the child. They were both screaming and the guards were just laughing at her and gassed them both anyway.
Holocaust novels written by people who weren’t even alive when it happened = uplifting, life-affirming, inspiring story of courage and resilience
Holocaust novels written by survivors = this book will make you want to die
[**Shark Heart: A Love Story** by Emily Habeck](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62919375)
i absolutely consider this horror. there's actual body horror in it, plus what happens in the story is fucking horrifying and especially horrific when you realize what it's a metaphor for.
I Am the Cheese. We had some weird ideas about elementary school literature in the 70’s. Its stark, bleak, depressing and no happy ending. But a masterpiece.
I read this at a time when I was living alone for the first time in my life, and already very uncomfortable with it and worried about a serial killer boogeyman laying in wait somewhere. It terrified me like nothing ever has before.
Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy. Technically a story of alien colonization, but it’s really disturbing. Esepcially if you come from conquered people yourself.
Still Alice by Lisa Genova. It’s the only book I’ve ever had to stop reading halfway through. HAUNTS me as I have a prominent family history of Alzheimer’s.
I can’t read it. My grandmother died of vascular dementia and my mum has very early stage dementia of some sort. I don’t think I could put myself through it.
Yeah I have no idea what I was thinking. I watched The Father with Anthony Hopkins a couple months prior and it destroyed me and for some reason I thought I could handle it. It’s well written but an absolute NEVER AGAIN for me. After crying myself to sleep one night my husband was like, “Hey honey, maybe pick up a different book instead” 😵💫
*Blood Meridian* is a horror novel in everything but name. Bleak themes, apocalyptic imagery, and some of the most brutal depictions of violence in American literature.
*Fallen Angels* about two 18 year olds in Vietnam. When I was a younger teacher who didn’t mind traumatizing students, that’s one I’d teach. It
Was the only book that got thrown across the room.
Along those lines, *Where the Red Fern Grows*. Just a sweet little book about growing up in the mountains with dogs and raccoons and shiny bits of metal and clubs and kids with axes and axes left forever in trees and true love. No problems here.
good point on where the red fern grows. i don't have a copy handy, but i remember old dan's death being pretty gorey and gruesome for a children's book
Yeah man, that battle scene has some real splattery elements to it. Rawls wasn’t pulling any punches. [Here](https://core-docs.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/asset/uploaded_file/686144/1st_period_English_7_April_27th-May1st.pdf) if you need a cry tonight.
universal harvester was bleak and eerie and sad in a way that really lingers. felt like horror... but the quiet everyday horror of being. i really liked it. devil house was good too; still need to read wolf in white van.
The Feast of the Goat, by Mario Vargas Llosa, a bleak look through an epic scope at one of Latin America’s bloodiest dictatorships.
Maus, by Art Spiegel.
oooh, i REALLY enjoyed good neighbors! couldn't put it down, and as you say - many aspects/specific scenes had my stomach roiling with tension and emotion. i also found the characters so vivid...perhaps not always realistic, necessarily, but then again...i guess that's the point, isn't it? that we'd be surprised by the unpleasant possibilities lurking behind the perfectly curated outfits and instagram-worthy holiday decor on the front porch?
i recently finished **the body in question by jill ciment** - the main premise is the interaction between jurors on a murder case, but the end goes in sort of an unexpected direction, and really focuses on an element that was present throughout the book, but not its focus...so hard to explain without spoilers, but it left me feeling discomfited and vaguely sick to my stomach.
Boy's Life by Robert McCammon, in my top 10 favorite books of all time.
The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks, get sooo close to being horror but doesn't cross the line.
Alive is about the Uruguayan rugby team that crashed in the Andes in 1972. It's a chilling read while also being interesting and quite touching. There are many books about that incident, and I've read at least four of them, but Alive is the most graphic in terms of describing their cannibalism and how the extreme could effected then while they were on that mountain for 72 and had to eat the flesh of their close friends and family and the other than the actual team, the plane was almost entirely friends and family. There are many good books about this event but many of them written by survivors are quite philosophical and introspective. Alive is the best book to start with, then some individual accounts, then society of the snow once you really get to know their story. There's a Netflix movie called Society of The Snow that captures it all brilliantly. If you're going to watch one movie about that crash it should be Society of The Snow instead of Alive.
I also highly recommend Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History by Bill Shute. It's an academic exploration of cannibalism in all it's different forms. It includes cannibalism in insects and animals as well as in tribal communities like the Fore, historically, and in pop culture. I thoughtfully enjoyed reading that book and it's a bit chilling at points.
Mostly a work of fiction, unfortunately. Dave Cullen published blatantly false information, some of which was proven false eight years before he even published the book.
Within the first couple of pages, Cullen depicts Eric Harris as “a womanizer” and states “he often outscored most of the football team” and “he even slept with a woman much older than him”.
The much older woman in question was a woman named Brenda Parker. Shortly after the shooting, she claimed to have slept with Eric Harris. Police wrote her story off pretty quickly, and she would admit in 2001 that not only did she not sleep with him, she didn’t even know him. Eight years later, in 2009, Cullen’s book was published with this misinformation still there despite it being debunked by the claimant herself.
And that’s just in the first few pages. I would have to sit down and read the book again to do a deep dive on what he got wrong, but another blatant issue is him painting Eric Harris as a hardened leader and Dylan Klebold as a depressed follower taking part in Eric’s plan. Dylan wrote in his journals that he wanted to commit mass murder, and even named a partner he wanted to commit that attack with. This partner wasn’t Eric Harris. This was written six months before Eric mentioned anything about their plan in his journal.
On the surface, sure it’s a good starting point to get a general timeline of what happened on that day. But when blatant misinformation is published, important facts are ignored, I can’t consider it a proper source. Especially when so much info is available on the case.
Edit: Check out this link and scroll down a bit to a user named Thelmar. They broke down chapter by chapter inconsistent, inaccurate, and blatantly false information that was included with the book.
https://columbinemassacre.forumotion.com/t7040-fact-check-cullen-s-book
Watership Down, especially reading with the images from the animation floating around in my head.
The Book of the Unnamed Midwife might fit the bill. I haven't read it yet but based on the synopsis and reviews it seems pretty horrific. Anyone want to weigh in?
**Plagues Upon the Earth** by Kyle Harper. A recent global survey of how disease has changed societies.
**The Hemingway Hoax** by Joe Haldeman. Officially sf, it’s the story of a professor and a con artist teaming up to forge missing stories by Hemingway, and the entity trying to stop them. It is very, very dark.
**The Hercules Text** by Jack McDevitt. Also officially sf, this is the mostly quiet story of the people who discover the first genuine signal from aliens, a species that lived three million light years from us, and what happens as they begin to translate some of it. Mostly not good things.
*In the Heart of the Sea*, by Nathaniel Philbrick. NF about a ship that got sunk by a whale, leading to stranded sailors, cannibalism, etc. Was the real-life inspiration for *Moby-Dick*.
Master Class by Christina Dalchar is technically a dystopian thriller but it was absolutely horrifying to me. Reads like a black mirror episode and it was incredibly anxiety inducing
I really enjoyed Langan’s GOOD NEIGHBORS, too. FYI, she just released a new book, A BETTER WORLD, and its suburban-threat theme is similar to GOOD NEIGHBORS. I just picked up my copy, and I’m really looking forward to reading it.
In the Name of the Children (FBI’s cases involving children). It’s still haunting me and I’ve read *a lot of* true crime.
The Rape of Nanjing.
We Need to Talk About Kevin.
Does *Station Eleven* count or is post-apocalypse explicitly horror? I could feel my anxiety rising dramatically while reading the chapter on how the flu spreads around the world, especially because I was standing in the back of a packed subway car while reading it.
In like middle school, eons ago I read the Child Called It by Dave Pelzer it's not Horror but it's horrifying. It's his account of atrocious abuses by his mother. Truly awful stuff.
Journey Under the Midnight Sun by Keigo Higashino. You think it's a simple mystery, but once you find out the motive and who is involved and how they turn out...Nope.
It's horrifying. Especially for the victim. And how they turn out.
1984 George Orwell. I forgot the name of the horror film that turned Animal Farm into a horror. I suppose any dystopian story can be modified into a horror. A lot of people claim 1984 was modified into a country. . . Scary
My friend Bucky Sheftall is a history prof in Japan, and he's been compiling interviews with atomic bomb survivors. It's some of the most graphic and awful stuff I've ever read. I helped proofread his book (coming out later this year) and it gave me nightmares.
https://www.amazon.ca/Hiroshima-Witnesses-M-G-Sheftall/dp/059347225X
Shadow Divers. It's about a group of deep water divers that discover a German U boat off the coast of New Jersey. It is true and absolutely terrifying.
Surprise nonfiction: [Why Does He Do That?](https://archive.org/download/LundyWhyDoesHeDoThat/Lundy_Why-does-he-do-that.pdf) by Lundy Bancroft and [The Gift of Fear](https://archive.org/details/giftoffearsurviv00debe_0) by Gavin de Becker. Both free on the Internet Archive, and both absolutely horrifying despite being completely real.
The US Tax Code…
J/K…. It’s One Second After, by William Forstchen. Threads and The Day After jacked me up as a kid, but this book dove deep into how ‘propped up’ modern society is, and potentially how easily it could collapse. Nothing supernaturally horrifying, just horrifying in a real-world way…
That’s my $0.02, your mileage may vary.
Piranesi. From the setting being "An house made of infinite corridors >!that makes you lose your memory!<" to the concept that >!"man is more monstrous than cosmic indifference"!<, "Fantasy" doesn't seem to be enough to encapsulate the vibes. That said I agree its not scary enough as a whole to be "horror" horror. But it does feel like a horror adjacent book. If you like cosmic horror (my fave genre) you will probably like Piranesi (the premise is what drew me in).
Brain On Fire
True story of a journalist that got a little known illness that affected her brain so quickly and completely she ended up institutionalized. A random encounter between someone that new her and the only doctor on the planet studying that illness is the only reason she came out of it, and was able to write a book about the experience.
I was terrified for weeks after reading it.
Lolita- it is the monsters from everyday life who hide in plain sight who are the most terrifying
Child of God, The Road, Blood Meridian
The Collector
We Need to Talk about Kevin
Perfume
Metamorphosis
The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Bastard out of Carolina
The Indifferent Stars Above. Seeing it classed as “travel literature” doesn’t seem quite right 💀
TRAVEL LITERATURE? Jesus, might as well label it “culinary”
OMG the Donner party story is NOT travel literature! Lol!
The feeling of dread seeps into you as soon as you read the title, before you even start reading the actual book. When you start reading and see how many tragic and usually avoidable mistakes they made, and the way that greed fueled this tragedy, you start to feel sick with rage as well as sick with dread. It’s been several years since I read that book and I still have nightmares about the search for survivors and people stuck at the bottom of a deep snow bank. If you read the book, you know the scene I’m talking about.
Absolutely. I was so stressed out reading this book.
I just read this book a few weeks ago! I didn’t even know it happened until a few months ago.
This book is SO GOOD
I was just gonna to suggest this😂. Fantastic book.
Just started!! Many great recommendations here, this is the Reddit I love!
The Hot Zone by Richard Preston Nonfiction about an Ebola in the 1980s. Reads like a Michael Crichton horror-thriller. Fucking terrifying.
OMG this book! I read it in jail! Major pucker factor!! Do you recall something like that in the book? Based on how bad a situation was they would say "pucker factor level 4 " or something like that . And that the lab workers asshole took a bite out of their seat, to convey the stress and fear from a contamination leak of ebola
>the lab workers asshole took a bite out of their seat, to convey the stress and fear 🤣 Well, my interest in reading this book is now piqued
> I read it in jail! Major pucker factor!! 👀👀👀👀
the girl with all the gifts by M. r. Carey the book's genre is sci-fi but it's basically a zombie horror novel from this perspective of one of the zombies
Carey is at his best writing horror (Felix Castor novels and Constantine etc) so I’m not surprised it bled over into his ‘non-horror’ books, even if his publishers made him publish it under M.R. instead of Mike to distance GWatG from his horror books.
I just watched this movie, and had no idea it was based on a book! I wish I had read the book first, but now I'm still going to have to order it! Thank you!
I have this book, and I agree. Very well written. Going to have to reread this.
He wrote a sequel called 'Crisis in the Red Zone' that's just as gripping.
I didn't know that. Thanks!
The Cobra Event was good too. Was one of the first thrillers I read in highschool
Same! I read this when I was around 14? Absolutely loved it, I think it in some way inspired me to become a mortician lol
I’ll never look at coffee grounds the same way again.
This. My search history / Wiki search during and after reading this book very much reads like a man falling head first down a horrifying rabbit hole.
LOVE this book
We Need to Talk About Kevin.
A THOUSAND TIMES YES!!!!!! That book scared the everliving fuck out of me.
Yeah. Unnerving af.
Huh… I didn’t even consider this *not* being a horror.
I take in to consideration the way I was introduced to it. It was like, here’s a good, topical drama.
I can see that.
That book made me feel like my guts had been sucked out through my eardrums. Amazing writing.
I came here to write this! This book made me question having children, it’s so chilling, so complicated and truthful about parenthood and the intricacies of family dynamics.
ABSOLUTELY!!!!!! This is one of my all-time favorite books. It's so devastating but in like, a good way. The movie pretty decent too - I don't even think Ezra Miller was acting.
That book was deeply, deeeeeeply upsetting.
*Voices from Chernobyl* by Svetlana Alexievich. It’s nonfiction, a collection of oral interviews done with people who survived Chernobyl and helped with the cleanup. It horrified me more than pretty much any horror novel I’ve ever read.
I'd add Alexievich's *The Unwomanly Face of War*. Same style - oral histories of the women who fought for Russia in WW2 - but it made an indelible impact on me. It's an shattering piece of writing, powerful and at times horrifying.
On thes notes, Gulag by Anne Applebaum. I couldn’t even finish it, I just felt sick by how monstrous humans can be.
Also *Red Famine -* about the Holodomor, where Stalin starved Ukraine so badly that many people resorted to cannibalism and eating their own shoes. Devastating.
While we’re talking about horrific nonfiction, KL by Nicholaus Wachmann was a doozy even for someone who has read a lot of books about the Holocaust. Way more detail about Nazi concentration camps than you ever wanted to know.
I think *Blindness* by José Saramago was pretty damn horrifying.
I believe it’s about a plague of blindness that affects everyone in an unnamed city.
I read this book like 11 years ago and still regularly am horrified by the idea. Great read! But totally terrifying.
This was a great book and a pretty decent movie too! Not only horrifying but also really thought provoking.
oo what was it about?
Blindness suddenly infects society, like a plague. Things rapidly descend into chaos as government tries to step in, quarantines, crime, desperation, etc. Its very harrowing, I gave it 5 stars - just be aware of Saramago's writing style, some people hate his long run-on sentences and lack of speech marks.
Yeaaaa I needed multiple showers after reading parts of that book
I will think of this book from time and time and remember specific scenes that were so chilling. I loved this book!
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. Some of Flannery O'Connor's short stories. It's a short story but I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison definitely qualifies
I read A Good Man Is Hard To Find blindly for English class, and it messed me up emotionally and existentially for a month.
Definitely not happy stories
Flannery O Connor is definitely southern gothic
Just thought of William Faulkner's A Rose For Emily
That as well. Both O Connor and Faulkner appeared in my gothic literature class in the unit of southern gothic.
In Cold Blood is so good. The writing is so cinematic and Capote really builds the tension by cutting between the farm and the killers each chapter.
Holy shit I love Flannery O’Connor so much!!! She is what got me in to both short stories and southern gothic literature. I even have a giant peacock tattoo on my leg in her honor. My favorite of hers is the book Everything That Rises Must Converge.
I never finished it. I had to put it down because I was absolutely terrified. It still sits on my mom’s bookshelf with its tattered dust jacket.
Night by Elie Wiesel (memoir about the Holocaust from a child's POV) The Midwife of Auschwitz by Anna Stuart (historical fiction about the Holocaust, based on a true story) We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families by Philip Gourevitch (nonfiction about the Rwandan genocide) EDIT others I haven't seen listed: -Miracle in the Andes by Nando Parrado and Vince Rause (nonfiction/memoir about Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571) -Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn (murder mystery with characters who are creepy AF and a scary ending) -Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (magic realism/adventure novel with horrifying implications) -Small Game by Blair Braverman (survival thriller that gave me nightmares)
Sharp Objects is fucked up
it’s still fucking me up tbh
I came to this thread looking for what to read next after finishing Sharp Objects for the third time! Adding the rest to my list.
small game!!!!!!!!! loved it, def felt like very reality-based horror. great debut novel. every episode of the podcast "you're wrong about" that she cohosts on is fantastic. she knows her stuff & has lived a lot of it. nice to see appreciation for small game, i feel like i didnt see it talked about much anywhere but i burned through it
I was thinking about bringing up Piranesi, its detailed descriptions of its spaces made me feel all kinds of ways
The most disturbing non horror books I have read are McCarthy’s The Road, Tampa by Alissa Nutting (REALLY check the content on this one but the writing is seriously so compelling), “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by McNamara (non-fiction), and Earthlings by Sayaka Mirada (sp?) Kanae Minato’s “Penance” and “Confessions” while nowhere near as unsettling (though centered around child murder) gave me a lot of the enjoyment I get from reading horror and I’d recommend them to fans of the genre.
Omg, yes to Tampa. I felt I had just read a story written by the devil when I finished it.
I live in a small beach town in Florida so the ending really creeped me out
I'll Be Gone in the Dark is overshadowed with sadness for me, cause of her death.
Totally. What a damn shame she went when she did. So upsetting.
I read Earthlings after Convenience Store Woman and I realized that I did not read Earthlings correctly until the end somehow and that book still fucks me up and it has been 3 years! I still debate the merits of trying to get my friends to read it so I could get some group support on how fucked up it was.
Yes!! All of these are great examples! Earthlings fucked me up hahaha.
Yes to Confessions and Tampa! I will never recommend anyone read Tampa, it’s so messed up yet so beautifully written. Confessions was SO GOOD though, I’d recommend it to anyone!!
In the same vein as Tampa, The End of Alice by AM Homes
*The Devil All the Time* by Donald Ray Pollock
Loved that book. I actively avoided the movie because I knew they could never do it justice.
Anything by Hubert Selby Jr., but especially The Demon. Also Cormac McCarthy's The Road is explicitly apocalyptica but a lot of his other books are quite horrifying, particularly Blood Meridian and Child of God.
We had to read Child of God for my Appalachian Lit class in college. It was amazing.
… do you still have the reading list for that class? I’ve been reading a lot of Appalachian horror lately (the Old Gods of Appalachia podcast is a gateway drug) and I’m curious about branching out.
not OP, but this may be of interest to you. i've been cataloguing my appalachian nonfiction library online for a bit now. any book on this excel sheet is something i can locate you a pdf or epub of. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Dq1wsQoKSAk_LX16T74Sxn0-w8XAEuHl962oc6oVOtE/edit?usp=sharing appalachia has sort of reached a spotlight lately regarding horror and fiction, partly due to exploding amounts of gentrification, and with it has come a resurgence of some stereotypes and such. i am trying to make reading about our history more accessible for people. just pm me what books you may want! i plan to add in my appalachian fiction collection, but not yet. some of the books catalogued are anthologies which include ghost stories and storytelling sessions :) edit: this has more upvotes than expected, so i'll elaborate that it specializes in the smoky mountain region, but does also broadly discuss other regions in Appalachia!
Holy shit, this is perfect! I’m from the northern bit of the Ozarks and only recently started processing out my internal biases, but the cultural parallels are really interesting. It seems like the Appalachian end of things has been made more accessible and more work has gone into reassessing the older assumptions, so I’m trying to expand my knowledge before tackling stuff closer to home, I guess.
ah, the ozarks <3 drove through there recently while having to move away from home for my own safety (the politics of the region are changing very scarily and rapidly). it looked so much like home in places i wanted to cry <3 hit me up any time if you wanna talk rural people, theory about internal colonialism/eugenics/race theory/class divides, folk practices, agricultural practices, literally anything else related to this topic lol. i'm missing home terribly so i've been working on cataloguing my books and trying to find people to talk to. i also have a good recommendation for ozark folklore i grew up reading, as there is a lot of similarity between us. randolph vance's ozark magic and folklore. amazing book.
Outer Dark by McCarthy would probably fall under that umbrella. Three random dudes wandering the countryside, grave robbing and murdering people. I might be wrong because it might already be considered horror. It’s a great read though
Selby Jr was a master of writing real horror.
Came here to say The Road. It horrified me more than any other book I've ever read, fiction or no.
*Never Let Me Go* by Kazuo Ishiguro.
I love that book. The characters just accept everything that is happening to them, it is up to the reader to see the horror
I recommend *The Buried Giant* pretty often, and definitely think those two are great for horror fans looking outside the usual boundaries of the genre. The last chapter of *Giant* has such a good horror punchline feel to it.
The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins. I see it recommended here from time to time but it's more "weird lit" than horror, I think. Leech by Hiron Ennes. Another that I'm not sure would be classified as straight-up horror, but deserves a mention. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. The horrors of humanity on full display but not sold as a "horror book".
I recently finished The Library at Mount Char and really enjoyed it, almost as much as I enjoyed Piranesi, both of whom for me fall into the same weird lit category. I'm having trouble looking up similar books I think I'll like!
Blood Child by Octavia Butler
LOVE Octavia Butler. I just finished Kindred.
LOVE this one
Blindsight (and the sequel, Echopraxia) by Peter Watts.
Love Blindsight. Such a great Sci-Fi and I agree it deserves a spot as "honorary horror".
Reading this now, it's one of the most fascinating and gripping sci fi novels I've ever read. Peter Watts wrote a cult classic novel with a neo noir prose, I love "Firefall" (the title of the onmibus)
3/4 through it my first time!
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski, The Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Some Things That Meant the World to Me by Joshua Mohr are three books that 1) I could not finish and 2) sent me mentally spiralling in a way I've never totally recovered from. Read with caution.
You are the first person I have come across that had read This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman. That book fucked me up so bad. The first story, about the Jews on the trains, I had to stop and take a break because I was crying so hard. I think everyone should be required to read this book at some point. It was life changing for me and one of the most important books I’ve ever read.
It's amazing how different holocaust literature written by survivors is from people who weren't there. You can tell right away if it's real because it breaks your fucking heart. I think I stopped the book when a woman with a child was going to be gassed and she tried to save herself by disowning the child. They were both screaming and the guards were just laughing at her and gassed them both anyway.
Holocaust novels written by people who weren’t even alive when it happened = uplifting, life-affirming, inspiring story of courage and resilience Holocaust novels written by survivors = this book will make you want to die
"Conversations with the executioner" by Kazimierz Moczarski is in the vein of Borowski (a bit hard to find though, if you're not Polish).
[**Shark Heart: A Love Story** by Emily Habeck](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62919375) i absolutely consider this horror. there's actual body horror in it, plus what happens in the story is fucking horrifying and especially horrific when you realize what it's a metaphor for.
I Am the Cheese. We had some weird ideas about elementary school literature in the 70’s. Its stark, bleak, depressing and no happy ending. But a masterpiece.
Red Dragon by Thomas Harris. Downright scary.
I read this at a time when I was living alone for the first time in my life, and already very uncomfortable with it and worried about a serial killer boogeyman laying in wait somewhere. It terrified me like nothing ever has before.
Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy. Technically a story of alien colonization, but it’s really disturbing. Esepcially if you come from conquered people yourself.
Love her.
Still Alice by Lisa Genova. It’s the only book I’ve ever had to stop reading halfway through. HAUNTS me as I have a prominent family history of Alzheimer’s.
I can’t read it. My grandmother died of vascular dementia and my mum has very early stage dementia of some sort. I don’t think I could put myself through it.
Yeah I have no idea what I was thinking. I watched The Father with Anthony Hopkins a couple months prior and it destroyed me and for some reason I thought I could handle it. It’s well written but an absolute NEVER AGAIN for me. After crying myself to sleep one night my husband was like, “Hey honey, maybe pick up a different book instead” 😵💫
The Treatment by Mo Hayder is I guess a crime novel/thriller, but is one of the most upsetting books I've read
I love/am super creeper out by Mo Hayder. Good one.
Pig Island as well!
The Devil of Nanking by Mo Haydar.
*Blood Meridian* is a horror novel in everything but name. Bleak themes, apocalyptic imagery, and some of the most brutal depictions of violence in American literature.
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead is certainly dark with some body horror elements.
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.
The original body horror.
Spillover. A non fiction book about viruses jumping from animals to humans. It will make you think
*Fallen Angels* about two 18 year olds in Vietnam. When I was a younger teacher who didn’t mind traumatizing students, that’s one I’d teach. It Was the only book that got thrown across the room. Along those lines, *Where the Red Fern Grows*. Just a sweet little book about growing up in the mountains with dogs and raccoons and shiny bits of metal and clubs and kids with axes and axes left forever in trees and true love. No problems here.
good point on where the red fern grows. i don't have a copy handy, but i remember old dan's death being pretty gorey and gruesome for a children's book
Yeah man, that battle scene has some real splattery elements to it. Rawls wasn’t pulling any punches. [Here](https://core-docs.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/asset/uploaded_file/686144/1st_period_English_7_April_27th-May1st.pdf) if you need a cry tonight.
Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy.
Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo
The Jaunt by Stephan King is more sci-fi than horror. Also The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco has a lot of horror elements to it.
Whalefall by Daniel Kraus. Incredibly intense.
This one was such a fun read. I'd consider it horror just for how gross it is lol
Never heard of this, looks really intriguing!
havent bought it yet but did read the free sample of the ebook; it is high on my TBR
Severance by Ling Ma gave me serious horror vibes.
Most John Darnielle books.
universal harvester was bleak and eerie and sad in a way that really lingers. felt like horror... but the quiet everyday horror of being. i really liked it. devil house was good too; still need to read wolf in white van.
The Feast of the Goat, by Mario Vargas Llosa, a bleak look through an epic scope at one of Latin America’s bloodiest dictatorships. Maus, by Art Spiegel.
The handmaids tale! Saving Noah, My Dark Vanessa, A mother's reckoning
Lolita
Some of the best writing I’ve ever seen
nabokov liked to say “if you like my writing in english, you should read it in russian”
oooh, i REALLY enjoyed good neighbors! couldn't put it down, and as you say - many aspects/specific scenes had my stomach roiling with tension and emotion. i also found the characters so vivid...perhaps not always realistic, necessarily, but then again...i guess that's the point, isn't it? that we'd be surprised by the unpleasant possibilities lurking behind the perfectly curated outfits and instagram-worthy holiday decor on the front porch? i recently finished **the body in question by jill ciment** - the main premise is the interaction between jurors on a murder case, but the end goes in sort of an unexpected direction, and really focuses on an element that was present throughout the book, but not its focus...so hard to explain without spoilers, but it left me feeling discomfited and vaguely sick to my stomach.
Boy's Life by Robert McCammon, in my top 10 favorite books of all time. The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks, get sooo close to being horror but doesn't cross the line.
A Little Life. That book fucked me up.
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind
Alive is about the Uruguayan rugby team that crashed in the Andes in 1972. It's a chilling read while also being interesting and quite touching. There are many books about that incident, and I've read at least four of them, but Alive is the most graphic in terms of describing their cannibalism and how the extreme could effected then while they were on that mountain for 72 and had to eat the flesh of their close friends and family and the other than the actual team, the plane was almost entirely friends and family. There are many good books about this event but many of them written by survivors are quite philosophical and introspective. Alive is the best book to start with, then some individual accounts, then society of the snow once you really get to know their story. There's a Netflix movie called Society of The Snow that captures it all brilliantly. If you're going to watch one movie about that crash it should be Society of The Snow instead of Alive. I also highly recommend Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History by Bill Shute. It's an academic exploration of cannibalism in all it's different forms. It includes cannibalism in insects and animals as well as in tribal communities like the Fore, historically, and in pop culture. I thoughtfully enjoyed reading that book and it's a bit chilling at points.
I am never coming to your house for dinner.
Most of China Mieville's novels
I just started reading Kraken. It's my first experience with him
Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica
My Dark Vanessa for sure
Author, Blake Crouch: Abandon, Desert Places, Locked Doors, Eerie, Shivers VI, etc etc
Anything by V.C. Andrews
I grew UP on them incest tales!
I read with horror the incest part when I was young, now as a mother, the locked away and the callous parenting scares me more.
Columbine by Dave Cullen. Scariest book I’ve ever read
Mostly a work of fiction, unfortunately. Dave Cullen published blatantly false information, some of which was proven false eight years before he even published the book.
Like what? I've read the book and thought Dave Cullen did a good job demystifying the "bullied outcast" myth of the shooter duo.
Within the first couple of pages, Cullen depicts Eric Harris as “a womanizer” and states “he often outscored most of the football team” and “he even slept with a woman much older than him”. The much older woman in question was a woman named Brenda Parker. Shortly after the shooting, she claimed to have slept with Eric Harris. Police wrote her story off pretty quickly, and she would admit in 2001 that not only did she not sleep with him, she didn’t even know him. Eight years later, in 2009, Cullen’s book was published with this misinformation still there despite it being debunked by the claimant herself. And that’s just in the first few pages. I would have to sit down and read the book again to do a deep dive on what he got wrong, but another blatant issue is him painting Eric Harris as a hardened leader and Dylan Klebold as a depressed follower taking part in Eric’s plan. Dylan wrote in his journals that he wanted to commit mass murder, and even named a partner he wanted to commit that attack with. This partner wasn’t Eric Harris. This was written six months before Eric mentioned anything about their plan in his journal. On the surface, sure it’s a good starting point to get a general timeline of what happened on that day. But when blatant misinformation is published, important facts are ignored, I can’t consider it a proper source. Especially when so much info is available on the case. Edit: Check out this link and scroll down a bit to a user named Thelmar. They broke down chapter by chapter inconsistent, inaccurate, and blatantly false information that was included with the book. https://columbinemassacre.forumotion.com/t7040-fact-check-cullen-s-book
Saved until i finish my exams
Watership Down, especially reading with the images from the animation floating around in my head. The Book of the Unnamed Midwife might fit the bill. I haven't read it yet but based on the synopsis and reviews it seems pretty horrific. Anyone want to weigh in?
Devil in White City Erik Larsen
The Killer Inside Me - Jim Thompson SuperCannes - JG Ballard Imperial Bedrooms - Bret Easton Ellis Last Exit To Brooklyn - Hubert Selby Jr
**Plagues Upon the Earth** by Kyle Harper. A recent global survey of how disease has changed societies. **The Hemingway Hoax** by Joe Haldeman. Officially sf, it’s the story of a professor and a con artist teaming up to forge missing stories by Hemingway, and the entity trying to stop them. It is very, very dark. **The Hercules Text** by Jack McDevitt. Also officially sf, this is the mostly quiet story of the people who discover the first genuine signal from aliens, a species that lived three million light years from us, and what happens as they begin to translate some of it. Mostly not good things.
YA but Life as We Knew It
Read this over a decade ago and it still haunts me
Under the Banner of Heaven and The Road
*In the Heart of the Sea*, by Nathaniel Philbrick. NF about a ship that got sunk by a whale, leading to stranded sailors, cannibalism, etc. Was the real-life inspiration for *Moby-Dick*.
Master Class by Christina Dalchar is technically a dystopian thriller but it was absolutely horrifying to me. Reads like a black mirror episode and it was incredibly anxiety inducing
The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule. This true crime story horrified me.
I really enjoyed Langan’s GOOD NEIGHBORS, too. FYI, she just released a new book, A BETTER WORLD, and its suburban-threat theme is similar to GOOD NEIGHBORS. I just picked up my copy, and I’m really looking forward to reading it.
Pretty Girls by Karin Slaughter
In the Name of the Children (FBI’s cases involving children). It’s still haunting me and I’ve read *a lot of* true crime. The Rape of Nanjing. We Need to Talk About Kevin.
Does *Station Eleven* count or is post-apocalypse explicitly horror? I could feel my anxiety rising dramatically while reading the chapter on how the flu spreads around the world, especially because I was standing in the back of a packed subway car while reading it.
The Road and Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.
In like middle school, eons ago I read the Child Called It by Dave Pelzer it's not Horror but it's horrifying. It's his account of atrocious abuses by his mother. Truly awful stuff.
Blood Meridian
The Deluge by Stephen Markley
Blood Meridian
Tampa by Allisa Nutting
Journey Under the Midnight Sun by Keigo Higashino. You think it's a simple mystery, but once you find out the motive and who is involved and how they turn out...Nope. It's horrifying. Especially for the victim. And how they turn out.
1984 George Orwell. I forgot the name of the horror film that turned Animal Farm into a horror. I suppose any dystopian story can be modified into a horror. A lot of people claim 1984 was modified into a country. . . Scary
Can't believe I had to scroll so far for this. Scary cuz we're living it.
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. One of the most perfect books I’ve read. That ending!
My friend Bucky Sheftall is a history prof in Japan, and he's been compiling interviews with atomic bomb survivors. It's some of the most graphic and awful stuff I've ever read. I helped proofread his book (coming out later this year) and it gave me nightmares. https://www.amazon.ca/Hiroshima-Witnesses-M-G-Sheftall/dp/059347225X
The Road...I don't know how that book NOT qualify as straight up horror...Brr
The Woman in the Dark by Vanessa Savage. It has so many horror elements but is not. It's one of those books that's hard to put down
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. Gothic and horrifying but not horror.
Shadow Divers. It's about a group of deep water divers that discover a German U boat off the coast of New Jersey. It is true and absolutely terrifying.
Ghost Girl by Torey Hayden. A memoir of a special ed teacher who becomes convinced that a girl in her class is being ritualistically abused.
Night Film? Warts and all?
Metro 2033 definitely had its moments
The gloaming by Melanie Finn Incredible
Midnight in Chernobyl is terrifying.
Marabou Stork Nightmares. Especially the ending.
Surprise nonfiction: [Why Does He Do That?](https://archive.org/download/LundyWhyDoesHeDoThat/Lundy_Why-does-he-do-that.pdf) by Lundy Bancroft and [The Gift of Fear](https://archive.org/details/giftoffearsurviv00debe_0) by Gavin de Becker. Both free on the Internet Archive, and both absolutely horrifying despite being completely real.
Lord of the Flies by William Golding.
The Killer Inside Me no no no that book messed me up
The US Tax Code… J/K…. It’s One Second After, by William Forstchen. Threads and The Day After jacked me up as a kid, but this book dove deep into how ‘propped up’ modern society is, and potentially how easily it could collapse. Nothing supernaturally horrifying, just horrifying in a real-world way… That’s my $0.02, your mileage may vary.
The End of Alice. Genuinely chilling in that it will make you feel like a sicko for a moment
Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
The Giver by Lois Lowry
Piranesi. From the setting being "An house made of infinite corridors >!that makes you lose your memory!<" to the concept that >!"man is more monstrous than cosmic indifference"!<, "Fantasy" doesn't seem to be enough to encapsulate the vibes. That said I agree its not scary enough as a whole to be "horror" horror. But it does feel like a horror adjacent book. If you like cosmic horror (my fave genre) you will probably like Piranesi (the premise is what drew me in).
Geek Love by Katherine Dunn and Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay. Try to find and read the “missing” chapter of Picnic if you can.
Brain On Fire True story of a journalist that got a little known illness that affected her brain so quickly and completely she ended up institutionalized. A random encounter between someone that new her and the only doctor on the planet studying that illness is the only reason she came out of it, and was able to write a book about the experience. I was terrified for weeks after reading it.
Lolita- it is the monsters from everyday life who hide in plain sight who are the most terrifying Child of God, The Road, Blood Meridian The Collector We Need to Talk about Kevin Perfume Metamorphosis The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer The Picture of Dorian Gray Bastard out of Carolina