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Given the sheer volume of horror fiction published over the past decade, it can be hard for the sensitive yet curious reader to know where to start. Fear is heavily individual — what sends me screaming from the room might leave you unmoved — so it’s difficult to predict what will or won’t frighten, disturb or disgust any one person. But there are ways to dip a toe into the genre without scaring yourself silly.
Sticking to the classics (“Dracula,” “Frankenstein,” “Carmilla” and so on) is one approach; they’re generally a little milder than modern-day thrills. But it would be a real shame to cut yourself off from contemporary horror: It’s where some of the most talented writers currently working are making their names.
The best way to start exploring horror is to find a book that blends scares with a genre you already know and love — thrillers and mysteries, sci-fi and fantasy, even realism, romance or comedy. It can be helpful to think of horror not as a genre but as a mode, or a tool: It functions the way salt does in cooking, brightening and heightening, making other ingredients sing and shine. Here are eight not-too-scary books that make a great entry point into the spookier side of literature.
The Reformatory
By Tananarive Due
When Robert Stephens Jr., a 12-year-old Black boy in 1950s Florida, is sent to a reform school for the crime of kicking a white boy in the shin, he quickly learns he has more to fear from the institution’s living residents than the dead ones. Robbie’s ability to see ghosts puts him squarely in the cross hairs of the school’s monstrous headmaster, who tasks him with finding spirits so they can be banished, effectively killing them a second time. The book’s prison is based on the Dozier School, the same institution that inspired Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Nickel Boys,” and to which Due has a connection: Her great-uncle died there in 1937, at the age of 15. In this powerfully moving book, she fictionalizes his too-short life, paying homage to the ghosts of all the boys who died there.
Looking Glass Sound
By Catriona Ward
Ward is published as a horror author, but her books could just as easily be shelved as thrillers, mysteries or fantasies. “Looking Glass Sound” has elements of all these genres: It’s a twisty, endlessly surprising novel about a writer with a failing memory, a serial killer in coastal Maine, obsession, betrayal and so much more. Ward has a Gillian Flynn-like mastery of puzzle box plotting; go in knowing as little as possible and you won’t be disappointed by what you find.
A History of Fear
By Luke Dumas
When Grayson, an American graduate student studying in Scotland, is approached by a stranger who wants to hire him to write a history of the Devil, it sets off a chain of events that ends in the murder of one of his classmates. The subsequent trial launches Grayson into infamy, and the novel is presented as his posthumous account of his descent into madness. Effectively a thriller with a sinister edge, Dumas’s debut novel handles its ambiguity admirably: Is Grayson’s unraveling the result of his satanophobia, or is something more diabolical at work?
Revelator
By Daryl Gregory
This blissfully weird Southern Gothic novel, set in Depression-era Tennessee, follows a small family who worship and commune with the Ghostdaddy, an enigmatic deity who lives beneath the Smoky Mountains. Stella, raised by her grandmother Motty to be one of the Ghostdaddy’s acolytes, flees this life as soon as she can. But when she returns for Motty’s funeral years later, Stella finds another young girl of mysterious origins who appears to have taken her place. Told in two alternating timelines, “Revelator” never once goes where you expect, and Gregory’s evocative prose and sensitive characterizations make this strange little novel sing.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
By Shirley Jackson
“The Haunting of Hill House” may be Jackson’s best known novel, but it’s pretty terrifying, even 65 years after it was published. So if you’re horror-shy, start with “We Have Always Lived in the Castle”: It’s a weirder, slipperier book, more destabilizing Gothic dreamscape than outright horror. This masterpiece of psychological fiction unspools the mystery of the reclusive Blackwood family — Merricat, the book’s deliciously unreliable narrator; her ailing Uncle Julian; and her agoraphobic sister, Constance — who have been living in isolation after a tragic scandal, until an estranged cousin shows up at the estate to disrupt their fragile peace. You’ll never look at a sugar bowl the same way again.
Lone Women
By Victor LaValle
In 1915, Adelaide, fleeing a family tragedy in California, sets out to claim a homestead in Montana with nothing but a steamer trunk, which she keeps locked at all times. Her diligence is rooted not in possessiveness but in fear: Whenever the trunk opens, people start dying. Like in “The Reformatory,” the speculative elements of “Lone Women” are used judiciously — most of the book’s events are based in documented history — and the focus here is on Adelaide and her lively tapestry of frontier neighbors. LaValle’s vision of the American West is illuminating and riveting.
What Moves the Dead
By T. Kingfisher
Kingfisher — a pen name used by the author and artist Ursula Vernon — writes across genres and age ranges, but her works of horror are something special. Here, she reimagines the classic Edgar Allan Poe short story “The Fall of the House of Usher,” about a crumbling manor inhabited by ill-fated twins, and the childhood friend who tries to save them. But while the events of the book are strange and sinister, the style and characters are warm and wry. “What Moves the Dead” features a stoic soldier, a formidable mycologist and a frightened doctor, all of whom feel real. Kingfisher’s work is often referred to as “cozy horror” — an apt description. The scares are effective, but you know you’re in safe hands.
Frankenstein in Baghdad
By Ahmed Saadawi; translated by Jonathan Wright
In Saadawi’s Booker Prize-nominated parable of U.S.-occupied Iraq, a junk dealer pieces together the body parts of his neighbors who have been killed by American bombs. The resulting corpse, when it awakens, is hungry for vengeance, seeking justice for the deaths of each of its component parts. But the monster is not entirely the point here: Saadawi writes rich character studies of civilians trying to survive and, much like the creature’s creator, stitches them together to form a striking portrait of life during wartime.
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