The most terrifying question of all, Stephen King once pointed out, is how much horror the human mind can bear and “still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity.” There is an especially gloomy resonance to this question at the end of a year filled with mass death and disasters. How do we cope? Where and towards what do we turn in search of succor?
We turn, as we have always done, to stories. To stories of heroes and hope, yes, but equally, to those that tell of monsters and ghosts, of the terrors that creep about in the shadows and the horrors that lurk within us. Because a scary story, at its most elemental, does more than raise the hair on the back of our neck: It helps us confront, and come to terms with, things we would rather look away from in the clear light of day — our rage and grief, shame and fear.
These are the themes that haunt the best horror stories, including the ones on this list. Each offers a portal to our innermost selves, where uncertainty and dread sink their claws the deepest. A couple of them are nightmare-inducing, and three are suffused with a despair so ferocious it casts a pall long after the last page has been turned.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones is a reckoning with a terrible past. (Source: amazon.in)
This wildly ambitious vampire story is gory, entertaining and does something truly fresh with a trope that has been done to death (pun intended). In 1912, in Montana’s Miles City, a Lutheran pastor is visited by an Indian belonging to the Blackfeet tribe who recounts, over the course of nearly 500 blood-soaked pages, a story of loss that is just as much the story of America — and the greed and bloodlust that defined its westward expansion.
Jones is not interested in pulling his punches: Some of the most upsetting episodes in the book are based on the actual history of the Native American genocide and the mass slaughter of the American bison (buffalo). It is a reckoning with a terrible past that cleverly uses a nested story structure to depict trauma of a scale that echoes down the generations.
When the Wolf Comes Home by Nat Cassidy
When the Wolf Comes Home by Nat Cassidy reimagines fairy tales as horror stories. (source: amazon.in)
When did we forget that what we refer to as “fairy tales” — those charmingly illustrated stories in children’s books that are all about orphans and wolves and wicked step-parents and witches — were originally horror stories? Cassidy’s book is one of the most terrifying reads of the year, a story that hews closer to the menacing tone of the lore collected and recorded by the Brothers Grimm than the candy-hued Disney stories many of us have been raised on.
The book propels the reader right into the action as wannabe actor Jess rescues a terrified little boy who has run away from home. The duo goes on the run, with the father practically panting at their heels. This is a book with a high body count that more than lives up to the lengthy trigger warning in the beginning. Cassidy uses classic elements — a vulnerable child, a deadly game of hide and seek and a big, bad “wolf” — to tell a story that subverts all expectations.
One of the final scenes takes place in a forest of the kind that Hansel and Gretel might have once got lost in, but for Cassidy, it becomes a site for excavating the pain of losing the ones you love and of loving those you fear.
One Yellow Eye by Leigh Radford
One Yellow Eye by Leigh Radford asks the lines one would cross for the one they love. (source: amazon.in)
How far would you be willing to go for someone you love? This is the question that haunts Radford’s stellar debut, a heartbreaking story set in the immediate aftermath of a zombie apocalypse. British scientist Kesta Shelley has hunkered down in her lab, looking for a cure to the virus that left much of the population undead. The stakes are personal, as her husband Tim, who was one of the last people to be bitten before the government started rounding up and disposing of the zombies, is currently tied to a bed in Kesta’s basement.
Horror has no shortage of twisted love stories, from Claudia and Louis in Interview with the Vampire to Miss Jessel and Peter Quint in The Turn of the Screw. Radford’s addition to this storied literary tradition weaves in a meditation on grief, the medical industry and ethics. Given her single-minded dedication to curing her husband, Kesta may be able to pull off a miracle. More likely, however, her obsessive love — and refusal to confront her loss — will only end up jeopardising the life of every single person on the planet.
Angel Down by Daniel Kraus
Angel Down by Daniel Kraus is one of the most ambitious and imaginative books of the year. (Source: amazon.in)
It is World War I and a band of American soldiers is sent on what seems like a suicide mission: To go into No Man’s Land and find the loudly — and incessantly — shrieking soldier stranded there. Turns out, the “soldier” is a wounded angel fallen to earth. As the rescuers’ encounter with this heavenly creature exposes them to one of the most hellish experiences of their lives, the novel expands into a meditation on human nature and the instinct for violence.
Kraus is an old hand at the genre, with several books and screenplays under his belt (notably, he has worked with horror icons George A Romero and Guillermo Del Toro). Here, he is in top form, telling a story about the worst kind of horror: War. Scenes from the battlefield are rendered in cinematic, gut-wrenching detail, in language that soars from brutal to mystical to lyrical. Written in a single sentence of astonishing rhythm and energy, this is one of the most ambitious and imaginative books of the year.
The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is an amalgamation of folklore, gothic horror and dark academia. (Source: amazon.in)
Folklore meets gothic horror meets dark academia in Moreno-Garcia’s latest. Minerva Contreras, weird fiction aficionado and grad student at the prestigious Stoneridge college in Massachusetts, can’t seem to make progress on her thesis about the obscure horror writer Beatrice Tremblay. A providential meeting that ends up giving her access to her subject’s private papers revives her interest in work and as she delves deeper into Tremblay’s life at Stoneridge during the Great Depression, and the disappearance of the woman she loved, she discovers connections to a tragedy in her family’s past in Mexico and a string of mysterious disappearances in her own time.
An intricately structured story that alternates between three timelines — 1908, 1934 and 1998 — this book is a study in slow dread. Told from the perspective of three women, the book also turns a feminist lens on witchcraft, exposing the power asymmetries that decide what gets to be counted as knowledge and what is dismissed as superstition. Moreno-Garcia is exceptionally skilled in building tension, and her deep knowledge of horror history, from the eldritch terrors conjured up by H P Lovecraft to the terrifying teyolloquanis of Mexican folklore, makes for a richly layered tale.
Each book offers a portal to our innermost selves. 
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones is a reckoning with a terrible past. (Source: amazon.in)
When the Wolf Comes Home by Nat Cassidy reimagines fairy tales as horror stories. (source: amazon.in)
One Yellow Eye by Leigh Radford asks the lines one would cross for the one they love. (source: amazon.in)
Angel Down by Daniel Kraus is one of the most ambitious and imaginative books of the year. (Source: amazon.in)
The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is an amalgamation of folklore, gothic horror and dark academia. (Source: amazon.in)
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