I’m a fiction and nonfiction writer originally from Rotherham, South Yorkshire but I now live and work in Glasgow. I have always loved dark books, even when I was a kid; I was firmly on the Goosebumps-Point Horror-Stephen King pipeline, and ended up in dark literary fiction. I love work that challenges the reader, makes them complicit, forces them to keep going despite everything because the writing is just so good. Here are five books I come back to time and time again.
I first picked this up in a bookshop in Bangalore, knowing nothing about it or the (now very famous) author.
I was unprepared for a novel that managed to evoke the lush and intense vibrancy of South Pacific Islands, the depravity of a real-life Nobel Prize winner who was accused of heinous crimes, and the heartbreak of losing someone to dementia – all at the same time.
This is an uncomfortable but unputdownable novel, and one that affected me so deeply I now have a tattoo of it; on my thumb is the symbol carved into wood to signal that the ’people in the trees’ live there, in memory of my beloved grandmother.
A thrilling anthropological adventure story with a profound and tragic vision of what happens when cultures collide—from the bestselling author of National Book Award–nominated modern classic, A Little Life
“Provokes discussions about science, morality and our obsession with youth.” —Chicago Tribune
It is 1950 when Norton Perina, a young doctor, embarks on an expedition to a remote Micronesian island in search of a rumored lost tribe. There he encounters a strange group of forest dwellers who appear to have attained a form of immortality that preserves the body but not the mind. Perina uncovers their secret and returns with it…
There are some novels that are absolutely perfect, and The Silence of the Lambs is one of them.
There is not a word, not a sentence wasted in this entire book, and despite the reputation of this novel and its well-known film adaptation, there is very little visceral horror ‘on the page’.
There are two or three moments of Hannibal Lector’s great crimes, but really this is a book about Clarice Starling, not only dealing with a killer but with the constant threat of violence – from the men around her, from the the job she is in, and from the memories of her childhood farm, and the lambs who wouldn’t stop screaming.
As part of the search for a serial murderer nicknames "Buffalo Bill," FBI trainee Clarice Starling is given an assignment. She must visit a man confined to a high-security facility for the criminally insane and interview him.
That man, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, is a former psychiatrist with unusual tastes and an intense curiosity about the darker corners of the mind. His intimate understanding of the killer and of Clarice herself form the core of Thomas Harris' The Silence of the Lambs--an unforgettable classic of suspense fiction.
Don’t be fooled by the fact that this is a tiny book – a novella, really, and a short one at that. It is no less creepy or affecting than the others on my list.
This is the story of a small French town gripped, briefly, by an illogical and insurmountable hysteria, and the way that played out for one very unfortunate man. Eat Him If You Like is both graphic and incredibly horrible, but the growing creepiness of the story comes from the fact that it is based on a real and brutal occurrence in nineteenth-century France.
You will be unable to turn away from how this unfolds, but those without strong stomachs – approach with caution!
A true story. Tuesday 16 August 1870, Alain de Money, makes his way to the village fair. He plans to buy a heifer for a needy neighbour and find a roofer to repair the roof of the barn of a poor acquaintance. He arrives at two o'clock. Two hours later, the crowd has gone crazy; they have lynched, tortured, burned and eaten him. How could such a horror be possible? With frightening precision, Jean Teule reconstructs each step of one of the most shameful stories in the history of nineteenth-century France.
I first read Beloved at university, doing a combined English Literature and Philosophy degree, and remain as affected by it as I was then. Toni Morrison’s aching prose means this story washes over you like a wave, subsuming you in the lives of the characters.
This is a ghost story, in that protagonist Sethe is visited by a woman who she believes to be the return of her lost daughter, but it is truly a book about the psychological trauma of slavery, and what it means to have a love that is “too thick”, to be forced towards unimaginable actions because of the horrors that have already visited you.
'Toni Morrison was a giant of her times and ours... Beloved is a heart-breaking testimony to the ongoing ravages of slavery, and should be read by all' Margaret Atwood, New York Times
Discover this beautiful gift edition of Toni Morrison's prize-winning contemporary classic Beloved
It is the mid-1800s and as slavery looks to be coming to an end, Sethe is haunted by the violent trauma it wrought on her former enslaved life at Sweet Home, Kentucky. Her dead baby daughter, whose tombstone bears the single word, Beloved, returns as a spectre to punish her mother, but also to elicit her…
Constance is a wild, stubborn young girl growing up poor in a small industrial town in the late 1800's. Beneath her thread-worn exterior beats the heart of a dreamer and a wordsmith. But at age twelve, she’s orphaned. Running away to join the circus—like kids do in adventure books—seems like…
Like all of Michel Faber’s work, Under the Skin sits between genres, carving its own path through a crowded literary landscape.
Set in the Scottish Highlands where the writer lived, and where I sit writing this for you now, this incredibly creepy novel explores the terror of isolation and of dark spaces, but more than this, it unfolds in a way that reveals a true horror at its heart – a horror in which its protagonist is complicit.
An avant-garde film version of the story by Jonathan Glazer is a perfect chaser for when you’ve finished the novel – but maybe have a breather in between.
Wilhelm von Tore is dying, and is writing a memoir on his life in medicine, his family, and, mostly, his darling Luci, the great love of his life, his dark-haired beauty promised to him in a dream years before they met. Though only together for a few months in her first life, their love is written in the stars. Using scientific research compiled over decades, Wilhelm ensures that, for him and his beloved, death is only the beginning.
But through the cracks in Wilhem’s story there is another voice, that of Gabriela, and she will not let this version of events go unchallenged. She tells the story of her sister Luciana, fearless and full of life, and the madman who robbed her from her grave.
Coyote weather is the feral, hungry season, drought-stricken, and ready to catch fire. It’s 1967, and the American culture is violently remaking itself while the country is forcibly sending its young men to fight in a deeply unpopular war.
Jerry has stubbornly made no plans for the future because he…
Liam was orphaned at the age of two by a group of giant carnivorous insects called the chitin. Taken in by High Councilor Marcus and his wife, Lidia, Liam was raised with their older son, Randolf in New Olympia, the last remaining city on the planet Etrusci.
