Fearful fictions

The spooky season is in full swing, with every streaming service worth its salt suggesting films that go bump in the night. A scary movie is a great date night (see C8 for the year’s best so far), but we suggest burning the midnight oil with one of these gripping, ghoulish reads.

From classic chillers to frightful new fiction, these terrific terror tomes will have you sleeping with the light on.

 

Mongrels: A Novel

By Stephen Graham Jones

American Blackfeet author Stephen Graham Jones (The Only Good Indians) is known for his twisted takes on beloved horror tropes.

The werewolf genre is ripe for coming-of-age metaphors (see the Canadian film Ginger Snaps), but Jones ups the ante in his tale of an unnamed boy who roams the American South with his aunt and uncle, an itinerant life partly forced upon them because of the destruction they cause when they transform — needless to say they never get their damage deposits back — but partly because they embrace their carnivorous heritage.

Jones parallels the teen’s sense of unbelonging (he’s unsure if he’s inherited the lycanthrope gene) with that of new generations of Indigenous kids who have feet in two worlds, but he also creates a clever new canon of creature lore, in which transformation isn’t lunar, werewolf urine is a pesticide and ticks are more deadly than silver bullets.

The story is full of action, humour and graphic body horror, but it’s also surprisingly tender. “If you’re not a beautiful monster, then you’re a villager,” his uncle tells him.

Mongrels has real teeth.

— Jill Wilson

 

Tell Me Pleasant Things About Immortality: Stories

By Lindsay Wong

This 2023 collection of “immigrant horror stories” by Winnipeg-based author Lindsay Wong is an unsettling and often darkly funny blend of body horror, the supernatural and mythology.

“We tell ourselves stories to live, but for women of colour and marginalized people, we tell ourselves stories to survive,” Wong told the Free Press in 2023. “We can’t survive without family mythology, we can’t survive without family secrets. And so much of it is carrying that inherited trauma and that pain, I think — especially women’s pain, that’s related to our bodies falling apart, and our youth, and our vanity, and our worth, as women and as immigrants.”

An unforgettable cast of vividly, hilariously, horrifically described characters populates these short stories, but perhaps none more so than the 380-year-old woman at the heart of the title story.

She is the only one to ever successfully eat the infamous Si Chi Hua, or Night-Blooming Deathlily, a toxic flower that will either kill you or grant you immortality — only to learn that eternal life is not the same thing as eternal youth.

— Jen Zoratti

 

Annihilation

By Jeff VanderMeer

Published in 2014, the first book of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy brought the prolific American author a new legion of fans, Nebula and Shirley Jackson awards for best novel and a 2018 film adaptation starring Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Oscar Isaac.

Melding cosmic/ecological horror with science fiction, the novel follows four women, all unnamed — a psychologist, a surveyor, an anthropologist and the narrator, a biologist — brought together as the 12th expedition into Area X, a mysterious corner of the world overrun by otherworldly flora and fauna.

Tasked with mapping the area and recording observations, the four are picking up where previous expeditions have failed — one saw members die by suicide, another saw the group members turn their weapons on each other, and another group escaped Area X only to die of cancer shortly after.

Not surprisingly, the 12th expedition begins to unravel as they venture deeper into Area X; there’s an element of anxiety running through the biologist’s narration that, in this world of surreal beauty and terror, is deeply unsettling.

Suitably creepy (and weird) as a standalone, as part of the trilogy (Authority and Acceptance were published in quick succession), Annihilation lays the groundwork of a world both stunning and deeply disturbing, offering an underlying critique of humanity’s impact on nature in the process.

— Ben Sigurdson

 

The Lottery and Other Stories

By Shirley Jackson

One of Shirley Jackson’s more well-known works, in this volume The Lottery sits with some of her other short stories, although not all possess the same unnerving quality as the titular tale.

Everything about the story is unsettling. It’s all so real and so very believable — which is, of course, where Jackson’s true genius lies.

This isn’t taking place in a haunted house or a ghostly mansion; it’s happening in a benign village, the kind of place most would have driven by, perhaps grown up in.

On the surface the characters are not particularly malevolent. They haven’t arrived from the Netherworld. It’s their very ordinariness that makes your skin crawl.

Jackson’s sparse prose makes the ritualistic sacrifice at the heart of the tale all the more disturbing, the final scene lingering in my mind long after I read it more than 30 years ago.

It’s so effective because it reveals darkness lurking in the mundane. Rooted in the familiar, terror here comes not from the supernatural but at the hands of people just like you and I, who have blindly accepted tradition and willingly surrendered to societal pressure.

— AV Kitching

 

 

Books of Blood

By Clive Barker

The release of the six-volume anthology series in the mid-1980s marked the British writer as a major new voice in horror-fiction (Stephen King’s blurb on the cover — “I have seen the future of horror… and his name is Clive Barker” didn’t hurt, either).

The hype was worth it, though.

The Books of Blood were published in 1984 and ’85, featuring 30 short stories showcasing Barker’s wild and wicked imagination.

The tales — carved into the skin of a fake medium — ranged from darkly humorous to flat-out gorefests filled with all manner of demons, monsters, ghosts, soul-eaters, shape-shifters, killers and even a sentient tumour.

The collection won the British Fantasy Award and the World Fantasy Award. One of the highlights, In the Hills, the Cities — about the citizens of two cities who bind themselves together to create giant walking creatures — won the British Fantasy Award for best short story.

Many of the stories have been adapted over the years in numerous comics, films and television series.

Barker would earn even more fame by writing and directing the 1987 supernatural horror film Hellraiser. He eventually left the genre behind as his novels evolved into full-on fantasy, but for fans of horror-fiction, the Books of Blood still cut deep.

— Rob Williams