It’s Halloween on Tuesday, so we asked a bunch of writers – some scary, some friendly – to choose their favourite spine-tinglers. What’s the scariest novel according to Ian Rankin? Which book makes Anne Enright’s blood run icy? Find out below.
1. Susan Hill: The Shining by Stephen King (1977)
A small boy rides a tricycle off down a long empty hotel corridor ... one of the unforgettable images from Stanley Kubrick’s film of The Shining, which the book’s author, Stephen King, hated. His privilege. Both are terrifying. An empty hotel in the middle of nowhere — Jack Torrance takes the job of winter caretaker and brings his wife and child with him. It’s a recipe for everything you can think of from King’s masterly horror imagination and as you go on, your own will work overtime. Don’t read it if books stick to the walls of your mind and won’t be prised off.
2. Anne Enright: I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison (1967)
I have a lingering memory of a science fiction short story I read in my childhood called I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison. It is set on Earth, years after mankind’s Allied Mastercomputer has wiped out humanity, but kept a few humans to torment in revenge for its own dissatisfactions. A small group wander a huge underground network, their bodies altered at the computer’s caprice. Plagued by hallucinations, hunger and by their own sexual grotesquery, they end up killing each other to escape. Flash forward hundreds of years and one remains, still shuffling around, now as a jellied blob who cannot harm himself or even, as that great title suggests, scream. Extraordinary how potent trash fiction can be.
3. Ian Rankin: Books of Blood by Clive Barker (1984)
I remember being petrified by Clive Barker’s Books of Blood. They were published in several volumes and I bought them when I was in my mid-twenties. The paperback covers were luridly redolent of pre-comics code horror comics — ghouls and cadavers and dripping blood — and the stories were varied, vivid and imaginative. My favourite was In the Hills, the Cities, which is as close as any prose writer has come to portraying a Hieronymus Bosch landscape. Barker was barely 30 when he wrote these stories, but his is an ancient soul.
4. Catriona Ward: Red Dragon by Thomas Harris (1981)
There are certain books I turn to again and again when I run aground creatively — Red Dragon is one. Every time I read it new details shine out. This prequel to The Silence of the Lambs hardly features Hannibal Lecter. Instead, centre stage is taken by the “Tooth Fairy” serial killer and Agent Will Graham, who is gifted with almost preternatural insight and empathy. It seems that Thomas Harris shares these talents — it’s no ordinary police procedural. Filled with razor-sharp psychological insight, it’s by turns hallucinatory, heartbreaking and page-turning. It’s also terrifying, a nightmare account of the deeds of a warped mind.
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5. John Self: The Horla by Guy de Maupassant (1887)
Admired by HP Lovecraft — who called it a “tense narrative perhaps without peer” — and namechecked in Lucky Jim, Guy de Maupassant’s story The Horla should be more famous than it is. A man suffering mood swings believes he’s the victim of a supernatural being he calls the Horla (roughly translatable as “what’s out there”) — and the lack of evidence just makes his belief stronger. The terror bleeds out from the page — “Save me! Save me from this suffering, this torture, this horror!” — until the reader comes to believe it too. It’s a perfect distillation of how fear cannibalises our sanity. “After mankind, the Horla.”
6. Charlotte Mendelson: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959)
I can’t read horror. Anything slightly supernatural fills me with unbearable terror; even Scooby-Doo is pushing it. So it’s a miracle that I survived The Haunting of Hill House, let alone adore it. Eleanor is lonely and that, as many of us know, is dangerous. When she’s invited to stay in Hill House (“not sane ... holding darkness within”) she ignores her instinct and in tiny increments of recklessness presses on. In subtle witty prose, spiked with the starkest insight into human weakness, Shirley Jackson brings terror upon Eleanor, while steering an elegantly ambiguous path. It is brilliant; even wusses should read it.
● The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson — why you need to discover this great gothic writer
7. RF Kuang: House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski (2000)
Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves is the only book I’ve walked repeatedly away from because I was too scared to continue. It’s not just the endless dark of the house whose dimensions aren’t quite right. It’s the masterly play between metafictional narrative layers – footnotes, excerpts, letters, ciphers – that drive you mad as you’re reading, trying to piece together what’s true and what’s made up. This is one of those books that deserves all of your attention, and when you tunnel up, you’ll be glad for sunlight and solid ground.
8. Laura Shepherd-Robinson: The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892)
I’ve always liked ghost stories that play with ambiguity. Are the ghosts in question objective fact or a subjective trick of the mind? The Yellow Wallpaper, a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, comprises the diary of a young woman shut away by her husband in an attic room due to her “nervous depression”. Gripped by delusion and paranoia, the unreliable narrator becomes obsessed with the patterns in the wallpaper, convinced that a woman is trapped behind it. It is an influence on many modern psychological thrillers and gothic novels with feminist themes, and a disturbing portrait of emotional torment within a traditional marriage.
What’s your favourite chilling novel? Tell us in the comment below
