Books that are haunting enough to stick with you long after you abandon their pages are the truly transformative ones. At the least, they leave a lingering thought, but the most effective ones can alter your perception of the world. As a person in recovery from substance use disorder since April 15, 2012, I have both dwelled in the darkness and lived in the light. This dual lived experience naturally informs my writing. I fluctuate between traditional horror stories and literary fiction with more mature themes. My goal in everything I write is to expose the reader to a new idea—one that sticks with them—for better or worse.
Very few books have left such a searing image in my mind as Iain Banks did with one particular scene in his disturbing novel,The Wasp Factory.
The story is told first-person through an increasingly unreliable narrator who lets us in on his private rituals, unsettling relationship with his father, and anxieties about his escaped mental patient brother.
This is a novel that takes its time easing you into the narrator’s world, and by the time you reach the climax, the culminating effect of budding dread and pure shock is enough to haunt anyone for a lifetime.
The polarizing literary debut by Scottish author Ian Banks, The Wasp Factory is the bizarre, imaginative, disturbing, and darkly comic look into the mind of a child psychopath.
Meet Frank Cauldhame. Just sixteen, and unconventional to say the least:
Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons than I'd disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim.
That's my score to date. Three. I haven't killed anybody for years, and don't intend to ever again.…
I first readThe Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien when I taught tenth-grade English. It was a staple of the curriculum, and I had to master it quickly.
I easily recognized its literary merit with O’Brien’s poetic prose, structural artistry, and philosophical approach to the nature of war. This is not a horror story; it is a war story, and as O’Brien would say, it’s one with no moral.
O’Brien is a real Vietnam veteran, and he uses himself as the narrator in this novel that’s structured as a faux memoir. The truly disturbing scenes depict how desensitized to violence and devoid of humanity the characters become. This one nestles in your psyche with its unanswered questions that it imposes, dropping you in the middle of an existential war.
The million-copy bestseller, which is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling.
'The Things They Carried' is, on its surface, a sequence of award-winning stories about the madness of the Vietnam War; at the same time it has the cumulative power and unity of a novel, with recurring characters and interwoven strands of plot and theme.
But while Vietnam is central to 'The Things They Carried', it is not simply a book about war. It is also a book about the human heart - about the terrible weight of those things we carry through…
It’s scary enough to read a story from the third-person point-of-view in which the protagonist gets kidnapped. You feel like a voyeur witnessing something perverse.
In John Fowles’ classic novel, we are subjected to a kidnapping and abduction through the eyes of the kidnapper andhis victim. It’s traumatizing to read the section of the story from the victim’s perspective, but it’s downright haunting when the same tale is told through the lens of the villain.
Why? Because Fowles so expertly crafts a realistic psychopath in the character of Frederick, one we can relate to and even sympathize with at times. If you survive the tragic, final pages, a tiny piece of your soul will forever be altered.
The Collector (1963) is disturbing, engrossing, unforgettable -- the story of an obsessive young man and the girl he kidnaps and holds prisoner in his cellar.
In our continuing trend of books with first-person narration making the list, The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson is by far the most brutal and unapologetic.
The narrator in this 1950s crime thriller is a sadistic deputy sheriff in a small Texas town who finds it easier to live out his darkest fantasies with each vile act he commits. ThinkAmerican Psychomeets The Andy Griffith Show.
What’s so haunting is that we are again inside the head of a psychopath, watching him justify his actions and maybe, just maybe, convince us that he’s not such a bad guy after all. Once you read this book, you’ll question every charming police officer who taps on your window, wondering what he or she is hiding beneath that smile.
Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford is a pillar of the community in his small Texas town, patient and thoughtful. Some people think he's a little slow and boring but that's the worst they say about him. But then nobody knows about what Lou calls his 'sickness'. It nearly got him put away when he was younger, but his adopted brother took the rap for that. But now the sickness that has been lying dormant for a while is about to surface again and the consequences are brutal and devastating. Tense and suspenseful, The Killer Inside Me is a brilliantly sustained masterpiece…
House of Leaves is understandably a divisive book. Some horror fans swear by it; others can’t make it through the first ten pages. And then there are those who don’t claim it’s horror at all. All points are valid and ultimately meaningless.
The central conceit of the story is that a family discovers that their house’s physical measurements are bigger on the inside than they are on the outside. This being a physical impossibility, they enlist help as the house evolves. Danielewski plays with space in a metaphysical sense. Empty voids exist in the dark cracks of our physical world.
This book haunts me to the point that I can’t look at the black holes in my shower drain without having an existential crisis.
“A novelistic mosaic that simultaneously reads like a thriller and like a strange, dreamlike excursion into the subconscious.” —The New York Times
Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations,…
From Nick Roberts, the best-selling author of The Exorcist's House and Anathema, comes fifteen dark tales that are as horrific as they are moving.
Witness absolute evil in "Sally Under the Bed" and "It Haunts the Mind." Endure vengeance and violence in "The Noose" and "The Bitter End.” Face the realities of addiction and grief in "Thanks for Sharing" and "The Weeping Wind." Survive otherworldly monsters in "The Paperboy" and "Voodoo Bay." In balancing the terrors of the supernatural with the horrors of real life, this collection drags you down the dark alleys of a haunted mind, forcing you to confront your demons, both real and imaginary.
My wife suggested we try scuba diving while on holiday in Grand Cayman. We were already falling in love with the island, and the incredible experience underwater opened a whole new world to us. From that moment on, our yearly travels changed completely. Our destination choices were now based upon diving opportunities. That was twenty years ago. Today, I’m a certified divemaster with dives all over the US (including Hawaii), the Caribbean (including Cuba), Australia, and even Iceland. Throw in my sense of adventure as a former race car driver, motorcycle rider, and outdoor adventurer, and I had plenty of personal experiences to create the AJ Bailey series.
Readers who enjoy police procedurals with an offbeat main character and fascinating locations will love this thriller.
One missing girl. Two lives on the line. Four treacherous challenges.
Nora Sommer's first case for the Royal Cayman Islands Police Service is one she'll never forget... if she survives. When the daughter of a wealthy businessman is taken, Nora is first on the scene and unwittingly 'chosen' by the kidnapper.
With the crime live-streamed across the internet, the eyes of the world are upon her as she faces a sequence of difficult challenges with the life of the kidnapped girl hanging on…
One missing girl. Two lives on the line. Four treacherous challenges.
Nora Sommer's first case for the Royal Cayman Islands Police Service is one she'll never forget - if she survives.
When the daughter of a wealthy businessman is taken, Nora is first on the scene and unwittingly 'chosen' by the kidnapper. With the crime live-streamed across the internet, the eyes of the world are upon her as she faces a sequence of difficult challenges with the life of the kidnapped girl hanging on Nora's success - or failure.
Deadly Sommer is the thrilling first book in the Nora Sommer…
