A book that reads like Hereditary, or The Witch, made me feel, does that make sense? Like you’re being brought forward, inexorably, towards an end filled with such inconceivably breathtaking, soul-consuming horror, that it just leaves you speechless with fear—the kind that makes your blood run cold, makes all the hair on the back of your neck just stand at attention, makes you want to throw the book across the room, makes you want to turn on all the lights in the house, leaves you glancing nervously over your shoulder for days afterward, the kind of dread and horror that really settles, really lingers.
For context:
– Stephen King just does not do it for me. I think it’s more of an issue I have with the way he writes
– Tried some Junji Ito visual novels—also just dredged up a comical, whimsical sense of horror, but nothing that really lingers
– Rosemary’s Baby I loved for the power of its prose and story-telling—Ira Levin is a fantastic author—but it read as a sort of fantasy novel and, not horror at all
– Flowers in the Attic—disturbing, sure, in the “wow, these sibling-fuckers really love going at it, huh” but other than the incest-shocker, at its heart it really is just a family—ha ha—drama
So far, the only books that have ever made me feel a sliver of genuine fear, for maybe a moment, would probably be Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, S.J. Watsons’ Before I Go To Sleep, and, on the non-fiction side, Eyewitness Auschwitz by Filip Müller.
TL;DR I love horror as a film genre, and because I also love to read, I guess I just need to find some titles that bring that terrific sense of fear to literature. Please, no body horror/gore—it just feels like a cheap cop-out, like grossing someone out isn’t the same as inspiring an insidious fear and dread in them.
by frootloopsupremacy