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October. The house has started making its noises. The radiator ticks, the pipes have opinions, and the hallway has, since about the first of the month, been a black rectangle you prefer not to look at.
Five horror novels for the season, then, graded on a single scale: how far from the hallway you’ll want to sit. Sit with your back to a wall. Keep the lamp on. See the instructions if you haven’t.
Same room as the hallway, door open
My Best Friend's Exorcism
Two teenage girls, best friends, until one of them comes back from a night in the woods different. Funny until it is not, and then it is very not. Possibly the best book ever written about friendship.
Start here if you’re new to the genre, because it’s half a comedy about being sixteen in 1988 and half a book about watching your best friend get taken from you. The horror sneaks in through the jokes. By the time you notice, you’re attached, and that’s the trick. Door can stay open. You’ll close it around chapter twenty.
Same room, door shut
The Only Good Indians
Four Blackfeet men did something on a hunt a decade ago, and something has come to collect. Brutal, funny, and heartbroken, with a final act that runs like a sprint.
Jones writes in a voice that’s funny and fast and then, without warning, isn’t. The thing that’s hunting these men is not a metaphor, or it is, but it also has hooves. The last hundred pages are a chase I read standing up. Door shut. Lamp on.
Different room from the hallway
Pet Sematary
A doctor moves his family to rural Maine, where the road is fast and there is a burial ground past the pet cemetery where things don't stay buried. King has said it's the one that scared him. It should.
The famous one, and the famous one for a reason. King has said it’s the book that frightened him, and the reason is that the horror is just grief, plus a path in the woods, plus a very bad idea that a sad man can’t stop having. The cat comes back first. That’s the warning. Nobody listens to the cat.
Different floor from the hallway
The Fisherman
Two men who have lost their wives take up fishing together, and hear about a creek in the Catskills where the catch is not fish. A slow, sad, enormous book. Cosmic horror with grief in it.
The slow one. Two widowers, a fishing habit, and a story-within-a-story about a creek that goes back a long way and down a long way. It takes its time and then it takes everything. The scale of what’s under the water is the scariest thing here, and it’s never fully shown. Read it in daylight. Finish it in daylight. Think about it at night.
Different building
Bird Box
Something has arrived that drives anyone who looks at it mad. A woman rows a boat down a river, blindfolded, with two children. The most frightening book on the list and you never see the monster once.
The one where you never see the monster, because the characters can’t, because if they do they’ll die. So the whole book is read blindfolded, in a sense, and every sound is a problem. The river sequence is the most frightening sustained passage I’ve read in a decade. I had to put it down and go and look at the cat, who was looking at the hallway.
Reading order
Exorcism, Indians, Pet Sematary, then a cozy mystery to reset, then The Fisherman, then Bird Box, then another cozy mystery. Then check the lamp. It’s on. It’s been on.