I’ve spent a lot of time curled up with 1930s detective novels, a safe and cosy world in which the worst thing that can happen is that you get stabbed with a jewelled antique dagger because someone is after your inheritance. I get it: this has been a weird time for literally everyone in the world. Sometimes though you need something better than a comfort read, which for me is where these books come in: a bracing breath of fresh air, a jolt to the nerves and to the thinking brain, a reminder that you need more than consolation in your life.
These books are all scary in their own way, but what they also have in common is absolutely blistering pacing, combined with a creeping tension that cranks higher and higher as you turn the pages. They’re all brilliantly entertaining, ultimately humane, and stuck with me for weeks after reading.
Do You Dream of Terra-Two? by Temi Oh
A group of desperately ambitious teenagers go to a horrible space academy hoping to be selected for a decades-long mission to a distant planet! This one is remarkably tense even before they go into space, and Oh’s outstanding characterisation lifts it into one of the most memorable SF books I’ve read in years. This wasn’t marketed as a horror book, but the sheer claustrophobia and fragility of life aboard the spaceship is as nail-biting as it gets: you absolutely know something is going to go wrong, it’s just a question of how…
Bonus points: excruciatingly accurate details of the British millennial experience. Baby astronauts reflecting on how they’ll never again go to Costa brought a nostalgic tear to my eye.
The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher
Sorting out your terrible grandmother’s weird house after she dies: sure, what could go wrong. Also, it’s in the middle of the woods far away from anyone? Why not! And there’s a hill behind the house that really shouldn’t be there, and mysterious bone effigies have started appearing hanging from the trees? UHHH. I’m an absolute sucker for folk-horror, and this book also contains a lot of my absolute favourite thing: bad old evil carven rocks that may or may not exist. Just call me the obelisk admirer.
Bonus points: you learn on page one that the dog survives.
The Changeling by Victor LaValle
I actually don’t want to tell you too much about this one. It’s better to go in with no idea of what’s going to happen, because the way the mystery unfolds—constantly opening up a grander and more terrifying world—is just a delight. But to give you an idea: it’s about a book dealer and a librarian who have a baby son. She commits an incomprehensible crime and disappears. He goes looking for her and finds that the shape of his world is far larger and stranger than he thought. The horror here is multilayered, running the whole range from intimate and psychological to outright, phantasmagorically monstrous.
Bonus points: it’s also very funny.
The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling
Cave-diving is the worst thing I can imagine voluntarily doing so GOOD NEWS this book is about cave-diving solo on an alien planet where you may be attacked by monsters at any time. And also, ghosts??? In fact, for me the scariest part of this book was the slipperiness of both the main character and her handler: both of them are lying to you at one time or another and there is a pervasive sense that either of them will do just about anything to achieve their goals. The whole book is about two characters having a series of remote conversations while one of them is down in a cave, and on this restricted canvas Starling manages to pull off some rich SF worldbuilding, a properly thorny, weird, tense f/f relationship, a wonderful monster, and some truly gruesome and terrifying moments.
Bonus points: you will never feel the same way again about your phone battery running out.
Rosewater by Tade Thompson
The city of Rosewater has grown up around an alien dome which appeared unexpectedly in Nigeria. The dome’s curious healing powers have drawn pilgrims from far and wide, but some of its effects are more insidious… I was sold from the first scene of this book, which involves a group of bank employees reading literature aloud in shifts in an attempt to jam telepathic hacking attempts. Both sweeping and intricate, creepingly unsettling, vibrantly original, with sinister government agencies, a decaying mind palace built of meat, and one of the most understatedly appalling alien invasions I’ve ever read.
Bonus points: there are two more in the same setting, so if you enjoyed the first one there is plenty more to get your teeth into.
Buy the Book
The Thousand Eyes
Originally published December 2020.
A.K. Larkwood studied English at St John’s College, Cambridge, and now lives in Oxford with her wife and a cat. The Unspoken Name is her debut novel. Its sequel, The Thousand Eyes, publishes February 2022.
“you will never feel the same way again about your phone battery running out.”
A friend found out that his Casio dive watch put out (just) enough light to serve as an emergency backup to the emergency backup light. He no longer cave dives.
The Twisted Ones was excellent. I ordered it after reading The Hollow Places for the Reading the Weird posts and loved both books.
Two of these have been on my TBR pile (well, the ebook equivalent of a pile) for a while. Time to get into them!
Thanks for the suggestions!
Of these, I have only read The Twisted Ones and The Changeling. Both EXCELLENT.
(Though I would have grouped The Twisted Ones with The Ballad of Black Tom instead. Both magnificent riffs on previous horror classics –Machen’s “The White People” and Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook”.)
I’ll check out the others now.
I’m claustrophobic. Just thinking about cave diving gives me horrors!
Horror mixed into sf is a huge topic.
GRRM has written a fair amount. I’m not sure how many fans have read his pre-ASoIaF material, so I’ll just say nice things about “Sandkings”, _Tuf Voyaging_ (mostly the beginning), and _The Armageddon Rag_.
Totally read _We Sold Our Souls_ by Grady Hendrix, who also writes for tor.com. Very fine paranoid punk rock novel which ticks a bunch of conventional and unconventional things to fear.
A lot of Greg Egan’s fiction is horror-flavored science fiction. Have a device in your brain which is copying your consciousness into something more stable than brain cells. What could possibly go wrong? I think this is mostly in his earlier shorter sf, not his more recent novels.
I second the recommendation of The Twisted Ones, Not only does the dog survive, it isn’t even frightened and is there for companionship, not a plot point. This may be the only horror novel which includes an NPR pledge drive– not part of the horror, but it becomes a plot point. I’m bringing up the light-hearted stuff, but the book is also scary.
Elansoe by Darcie Little Badger– up for the Hugo this year, and very scary fantasy.
Ship of Fools – Richard Paul Russo
Rosewater was excellent!
A professional oil rig diver once described cave diving to me as “not so much a sport as an inefficient way to commit suicide”. It was a generalisation even then, and equipment and procedures have changed, but still…..
The Luminous Dead is excellent. It’s one of exactly two horror novels that has ever had any of the desired effect whatsoever on me, I tend to find almost all horror excruciatingly boring. The other is Michelle Paver’s Dark Matter which would also fit on this list!
(Of the books actually on the list I have also read The Twisted Ones which I through was mostly pretty good but not particularly scary…)
My first diving instructor had been a commercial diver for years. He had many memorable stories. But the one that stayed with me was being part of a team hired to recover the bodies of teenage brothers who had been exploring a large network of flooded mines. The team was at it for days. They never found the bodies. The instructor told us he still had nightmares.
Bluewater diving, sure.
Wreck diving, okay, if the wreck is cleared, has no seds.
Night diving, yes.
Drift diving, oh yes.
Shark diving, love it.
Cave diving? HELL NO!!!!
The threat of a lingering death would not get me to go cave-diving. I start getting claustrophobic watching movies or TV set on submarines, let alone in caves. (Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is an exception because their Nautilus was SO COOL!) Episodes of NCIS that were set on submarines freaked me out. Das Boot is a great movie, but a flaming nightmare to watch. Caves? Uh uh.