A Literary Horror Reading List

One of the more interesting questions to emerge from the literary fiction discourse is whether horror can be considered ‘literary’. What categorises a novel as ‘horror’ is a story that seeks to elicit fear, disgust or dread, and simply put, literary fiction can be classified as a story that has an elevation of prose, a sense of the sentence, as opposed to the story driven purely by plot or defined by its subject matter. These seminal works collapse the boundary between the two worlds– bringing with them a new consciousness where horror tropes are subverted to paint an unsettling, caustic picture of the current times.

The Haunting Of Hill House - Shirley Jackson (1959)

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James and Shirley Jackson are the stalwarts of the American Gothic novel. Jackson had been writing novels and stories for nearly two decades before embarking on her tale of Hill House, a mansion set under a hill where visitors can turn up any time they like, but find it rather hard to leave. Dr Montague, a doctor of philosophy, wishes to investigate what constitutes the darkness, which has led to the house being shunned by all who live nearby. He intends to reside there for a summer, with as many people as he can find who have a sympathy for the paranormal. Two women – Eleanor, who as a child once seemed to activate a poltergeist, and Theodora, whose empathy is such that she’s effectively a mind-reader. Along with a young man called Luke, who is to inherit Hill House, they form a cosy party of four (not counting a housekeeper who resembles an automaton, and her grouch of a husband, who cares for the grounds). Literature loves a good haunted house and Jackson fills the book with complex, vivid insight. The real commentary of the story is the ways in which judgments and expectations dictate, trap and make vulnerable the outer and inner lives of women.

Beloved - Toni Morrison (1987)

A biting commentary on slavery, this novel was the winner of the National Book Award For Fiction, one of the most prestigious literary honours in the world. The book follows Sethe, a former slave and her daughter, Denver. It begins in Cincinnati, Ohio, where her sons have run away and Sethe believes it’s due to the presence of a malevolent ghost– the same presence her daughter believes to be the spirit of her dead sister. The story’s told in fragments of memories, flashbacks, nightmares and unfolds over two temporal planes– the present and the past. Beloved is not just a work of protest and advocacy, but also a serious work of art. 

The Devourers - Indrapramit Dasgupta (2015)

Dasgupta’s compelling debut novel looks at what it means to be a monster, and what it means to be human in stunning genre mechanics. In modern-day India, a lonely, queer history professor Alok is drawn into an unbelievable story of the past by a charismatic young man who introduces himself as “half-werewolf.” His strange new acquaintance hires him to transcribe the century-spanning odyssey of an immortal shape-shifter, Fenrir, whose rape of a prostitute in 17th-century India triggered a web of painful consequences for both. Violent and unsettling, Dasgupta’s prose is not for the skittish and inexorably rolls towards our own conclusions of right and wrong.

All The Things We Lost In The Fire - Mariana Enriquez (2017)

A stunning debut from the Argetinian journalist and writer, this 2017 collection of short stories is spellbinding until the last word. They’re filled with imagery of bodily trauma, often self-inflicted, and an undercurrent of the threat of violence runs through them. A schoolgirl yanks out her fingernails in response to “what the man with slicked-back hair made her do”. A boy who jumps in front of a train is obliterated so thoroughly that just his left arm remains between the tracks, “like a greeting or message”. In the title story, women begin to set fire to themselves in response to male violence. The relentless grotesquerie avoids becoming kitsch by remaining grounded in its setting: a modern Argentina still coming to terms with decades of violent dictatorship. The effect is so immersive that the details begin to feel like the reader’s own nightmares. The immense pleasure of Enriquez’s fiction is the conclusiveness of her ambiguity. We don’t know who has taken away a vanished girl, or murdered a child, or consumed a husband. They simply had to go. The world demands their sacrifice. We don’t know what the awful spectre is, grey and dripping, that sits on the bed with its bloody teeth. But we know that it is there through an inescapable logic, an intense awareness of the world and all its misery.

Her Body and Other Parties - Carmen Maria Machado 2017

This Cuban-American author kicks off the novel through a chain letter of eerie secrets in shopping malls, creepy Hitchcock-esque artist retreats, TV shows and nightmares retold with the familiarity of ghost stories. She takes folk tales from childhood, common urban legends and reimagines them with millennial, punk rock, bisexual, acid tones. She uses genre mashups to her absolute advantage and flits between horror, sci-fi, fan fiction, camp and psychological realism with a deft hand. The stories cut across 90s American suburbia featuring sharp social commentary that strike the perfect balance between current conversations and the timeless human experience. 

Bunny - Mona Awad (2019)

Blending sharp satire with fairytale horror, Bunny takes a hilarious look at the dark side of female friendship. The protagonist is an outsider at her elite MFA program for writers and is repelled by the other members of the cohort, especially the two rich girls who call each other ‘Bunny.’ Everything changes when they invite her to their fabled ‘Smut Salon.’ The first half of the novel feels like it'll be a riff on ‘Mean Girls,’ while the second half veers into more horror-esque elements and subverting dated tropes in horror writing.  

Nightbitch - Rachel Yoder (2021)

This novel is as strange as it sounds– about a mother in the throes of deep depression as her infant screams and kicks his way into toddlerhood. As a response to the pedantic ‘new motherhood magazines,’ advertisements for postnatal vitamins, organic baby food, the filtered videos on Mom TikTok, and all the advice that nudges her to let “nature take the lead,” the addled protagonist turns into a feral dog by night. This is where Yoder's smart prose, concerned with the realistic and the mundane, shifts into a kind of horrific magical realism. “She can be a better mother now since she’s a better dog,” the protagonist muses. The story, as a take on the radical changes parenthood demands, concedes that the balance between personhood and parenthood is only possible through something strange, impossible, and a little bit horrifying.