The book that haunts me – seven experts on the scariest thing they’ve ever read
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.
- 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.