Nightmare

• It lurks in long evening shadows, calls out through mysterious bumps in the night and blows down your neck whenever you feel a sudden shiver.
• With Halloween approaching, we asked six of our academic experts to tell us about the scariest book they’ve ever read.

A Dictionary of Monsters and Mysterious Beasts, by Carey Miller (1974)

• Lady Macbeth says it’s “The eye of childhood / That fears a painted devil.” She’s right.
• I bought A Dictionary of Monsters and Mysterious Beasts at a school book fair when I was seven.
• Miller’s book was undeniably a landmark in the development of my literary interests.

The Flypaper, by Elizabeth Taylor (1969)

• “Scary” is too glib a word for the chillingly believable conclusion of the author Elizabeth Taylor’s short story, The Flypaper.
• It starts with 11-year-old Sylvia, unloved and unlovely, riding the bus to her hated music lesson in the drab outskirts of a provincial town.
• When a man starts harassing her, she is reassured by a middle-aged lady who she feels is “keeping an eye on the situation”.

Dracula, by Bram Stoker (1897)

• Reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula was an unsettling experience I can’t forget.
• The story unfolds through journal entries and letters, revolving around a young solicitor who discovers that his client is a vampire.
• You know that feeling when something is so terrifying yet beautiful that you can’t look away?

The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson (1959)

• “Hill House is vile, it is diseased,” muses protagonist Eleanor Vance, on approach to the titular manor of Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House.
• Jackson, like me, suffered from parasomnias such as sleepwalking and nightmares, and there are moments in The Haunting of Hill House where the spookiness manifests itself through Vance’s sleep and dream-like trance states.

Things We Lost in the Fire, by Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell (2016)

• A book that still scares me whenever I think of it is Things We Lost in the Fire, a 2016 short story collection by Argentine writer Mariana Enríquez.
• The stories take conventional horror tropes – murder, mutilation, abuse, the occult – and weave them into contemporary tales of Buenos Aires.
• The stories shift between satirical realism and brutal surrealism, often when you least expect it.

The Woman in Black, by Susan Hill (1983)

• A place miles away from the nearest house or village where, as cliche as it sounds, there is no one to hear you scream.
• Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black serves as a truly haunting example of this.
• Lawyer Arthur Kipps is hired to settle the estate of the late Alice Drablow and embarks on a trip to her home, Eel Marsh House.

Les Chants de Maldoror, by Isidore Ducasse (1868-1869)

• Written under the pen name Comte de Lautreamont, Isidore Ducasse’s Les Chants de Maldoror (The Songs of Maldoror) did not scare me, but its images have long haunted me.
• This deranged and surreal work takes readers into the mind of Maldoror, a misanthropic wanderer who revels in his unrepentant evil.
• The book’s self-described “poison-filled pages” have a nightmarish quality throughout, with disturbing and yet sometimes darkly poetic descriptions of murder, malice and madness.