The best books that are a mix of wry humor and real horror

George Saunders balances humor and horror in a way very few can, in a word: perfectly. Every single one of the stories in this collection makes me smile and laugh and then with a turn, gasp and stop reading because I need to take in what is actually happening.

Saunders is a master at creating characters that are innocent and good-hearted, yet must deal with their life choices in this (at times) cruel world. His voice is unmistakable, both endearing and dark.

While we all know Kurt Vonnegut as a brilliant satirist, his humor very often is covering something incredibly dark that is lurking just under the surface. I find Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan can make me go from laughing at the absurdity of a situation to tears at the outcome, all of this in a matter of a few sentences. 

His writing is so tight and clean, but his storytelling is richly layered. While I’ve read this book several dozen times, I still find something new upon every re-read. It’s like it has something new to show me on each reading. 

Vonnegut was the first to teach me humor and horror are but two sides to the same coin.

While Nathan Englander (especially his novels) weighs in a little heavier on the horror side of my humor-horror scales, his collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges does have a thread of humor running through it that juxtaposes that darkness in such a beautiful way as to make it all the more terrible. 

The story “Reb Kringle” is about a cantankerous Jewish man who works as Santa in a department store.Or "The Tumblers", a story about a group of Polish Jews on a train headed for the death camps, who, realizing something is terribly wrong, pretend to be a group of acrobats in an attempt to escape their terrible fate. Hup! 

Nathan’s writing makes me laugh and cry in the span of a single story.

Southern Gothic author Flannery O’Connor is an incredible storyteller with characters often described as grotesque and morally flawed. Having been raised in the South, I find her characters so real it is as if I know them or have met them personally.

I know she disliked any of her stories being labeled ‘horror’ and instead called them ‘hard’. But you have to admit that a lot that happens naturally in life is indeed ‘horror’, so I use the term as a high compliment to her. But that alone would be too much, so she tempers it with her sardonic wit and has me chuckling at all the characters in “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” but the story itself hits in a very different way.

I read somewhere that Franz Kafka would laugh so loud when writing his stories that he woke up his neighbors. I’m not sure if that’s true, but I get it. It’s not what is commonly thought of when someone talks about Kafka’s stories. I mean, his name has come to mean a certain style. “Kafkaesque” is used to describe stories that are absurd, nightmarish, offensive, and heavy with bureaucratic pretentiousness and deceit.

Where is the humor? Oh, it’s there. I think sometimes readers get caught up in the horror and bizarreness of it all that they miss the subtle, absurdist, dark, and very dry humor dripping in all these stories in this collection.