Halloween IRL: A unique list of monster reads 

 

Editor’s note: Halloween is the perfect time for introverts to tuck themselves in and crack open a horror read. In tune with this spooky hour of the witch, we have here a list of 21 scary reads. But contrary to Halloween’s ghoulish spirit, our in-house horror connoisseur has a reading list focused on the purely non-supernatural—mental illness, flesh-eating viruses, and of course, artificial intelligence.

 

What are you waiting for? Dim the lights already…

 

Written by: Devarsi Ghosh

 

*****

 

Short stories

 

‘The Black Cat’ by Edgar Allan Poe

 

Psychological horror, i.e. the source of fear not existing in a fantastical realm but birthing in the mind itself, began with this one solitary man. Close to two centuries since he was active, Poe is an institution. ‘The Black Cat’ delivers a blueprint for stories of slowly creeping paranoia and guilt leading to terrible visions and violent actions.

 

Read ‘The Black Cat’ here.

 

*****

 

‘Saccade’ by Michael Cisco

 

What would Poe feel like in the 21st century? Welcome Michael Cisco, one of horror fiction’s best-kept secrets. Like a few other writers featured later in this list, Cisco writes in the Weird tradition. Cisco, also an academic, argues in his analysis of the genre that “producing the bizarre” is an “end in itself” in Weird fiction, “rather than a means to an end”.

 

In ‘Saccade’, a man claims he cannot process saccading masking (our brains erase visual glitches as our eyes capture movement—in absence of which our eyes would constantly process visual information as shaky-cam footage) and can therefore notice hidden messages in texts when his eyes move from one word to another. Cisco takes this conceit to a disquieting conclusion.

 

You will find the short story in Cisco’s collection Antisocieties. Buy here.

 

Listen to this well-done audio narration of ‘Saccade’. 

 

 

*****

 

‘Father, Son, Holy Rabbit’ by Stephen Graham Jones

 

Moving away from solipsistic psychosis, we have here a story of a father and a son in a hostile situation. They were out hunting and got lost in the snowy wilderness. The son is hungry. How far will the father go to keep his son alive?

 

Read 'Father, Son, Holy Rabbit’ here.

 

*****

 

‘The Lottery’ by Shirley Jackson

 

Widening the social scope further, we have this Shirley Jackson classic looking at how every community ritualistically sacrifices one of their own for its spiritual welfare. Cancel culture, religious excommunication, denationalisation acts from the State, you will find endless parallels here.

 

Read ‘The Lottery’ here.

 

*****

 

‘Ratanbabu and That Man’ by Satyajit Ray

 

Satyajit Ray was a master short story writer of the strange and the macabre, as is well-known to readers of his Bengali fiction. In this one, Ray tackles the issue of the doppelgänger in the deceptively simple way only he can. Of course, the plot leads deathward.

 

Read 'Ratanbabu and That Man’ here.

 

*****

 

‘Learning to Be Me’ by Greg Egan

 

A more complex and vastly weirder take on the doppelgänger by the reclusive master of ‘hard science fiction’—a subgenre classifying technologically accurate sci-fi. Egan, a mathematician himself, imagines a future where every person is implanted with an electronic copy of their brain. This copy exists to grow alongside the host’s brain, assimilate its working as closely as possible, and then replace the actual brain once it begins to deteriorate.

 

Well, is this story of freak-out paranoia told by the brain or its copy? Is there any self other than zeros and ones? Lots to think about here.

 

Read 'Learning to Be Me’ here.

 

*****

 

‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream’ by Harlan Ellison

 

From seemingly benign AI in the previous story, we come to an aggressively malicious and omnipotent AI in a future where humanity is no more, except for five individuals who are being endlessly tortured by a monstrous singularity formed from Russian, American, and Chinese super-AI. The story bludgeons and bulldozes its way to its horrifying conclusion, as you can see in the title itself.

 

Read ‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream’ here. 

 

*****

 

Novels

 

The Long Walk by Stephen King

 

It's fitting that we have this particular Stephen King novel in the list. King wrote this 1979 novel under his pen name Richard Bachman, to separate a series of darker, grittier books from the kind of supernatural horror (Carrie, Salem's Lot) that made him an instant star in the '70s.

 

Set in a totalitarian US, The Long Walk follows teenage boys competing in an endless marathon where a minimum pace of four miles per hour is to be maintained, or they will be punished unto death. This is harrowing survival horror crisscrossed with the kind of intimate Americana only King can portray.

 

Buy The Long Walk here.

 

*****

 

Last Days by Brian Evenson

 

Brian Evenson, like Michael Cisco mentioned earlier, is a Weird fiction superstar. (For good measure, we recommend his short story ‘A Collapse of Horses’, to give you a sense of his mind-bending style).

 

Last Days is a crazy book. It is a spoof of the American hardboiled detective fiction tradition (Marlowe, Spade, et al)—while also being a darkly funny indictment of religious cults. The plot follows a reluctant one-handed detective. He is tasked by a cult of dismemberment to investigate the murder of their supreme leader, a man who was just head and torso, for he had all his appendages voluntarily hacked off. It only gets stranger from there.

 

Buy Last Days here.

 

*****

 

Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane

 

Dennis Lehane's modern Gothic mystery is popular to most culture vultures because of the Martin Scorsese-Leonardo DiCaprio film adaptation of the same name. An American cop and his new partner travel to a remote psychiatric facility on Shutter Island to investigate the bizarre overnight disappearance of one of its inmates. Of course, nothing is what it seems, and our hero discovers the eternal truth: man is his worst enemy.

 

Buy Shutter Island here.

 

*****

 

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

 

Immortalised by Christian Bale's hilarious performance in director Mary Harron's pitch-perfect adaptation, American Psycho's first two-thirds are indeed the dark comedy you see in the feature film.

 

But the final third stretches into disturbingly evil descriptions of torture, mutilation, and delusion. The kind that would take multiple long showers across days to get this book out from under your skin. The best depiction of what neoliberal capitalism does to the minds of young men, this American classic is all the more relevant now in the era of amoral techbros and financebros who see not a parody but a guru in Patrick Bateman.

 

Buy American Psycho here.

*****

 

Boy Parts by Eliza Clark

 

This is American Psycho remixed by the female gaze. While Ellis's protagonist was a soulless, fractured individual driven by misogyny, the heroine of Boy Parts is a self-loathing artist who shoots explicit photographs of 'ugly men' whom she manipulates and brings to her home. This is a much slimmer book than AP, and doesn't have its thorough critique of capitalism. Enjoy this for sheer perverseness and cathartic man-hating.

 

Buy Boy Parts here.

 

*****

 

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

 

An intimate but exceptionally brutal story of a father and a son surviving an ash-stricken, apocalyptic America, where the survivors exist to kill, steal from, or eat one another. Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the book's prose is characteristic McCarthy: sparse, poetic, black.

 

No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.

 

Buy The Road here.

 

*****

 

The One Legged by Shakyajit Bhattacharya, translated by Rituparna Mukherjee

 

A young boy has been left by his mother at his grandparents' spooky mansion. He spends idle afternoons and ghostly dawns staring out the window, observing the spectral palm tree against the moonlight. He often wonders whether a one-legged ghost indeed lives atop it, as everyone warns him. And did it really snatch away his uncle?

 

Bhattacharya's novella delves into the dark, troubling imagination of a young boy, and the psychosis he develops all by himself, leading to a gruesome end.

 

Buy The One Legged here.

 

*****

 

In The Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami, translated by Ralph McCarthy

 

Ryu Murakami is Japan's answer to Bret Easton Ellis or Chuck Palahniuk. Although, to be fair, his decadent, transgressive stories of urban alienation and consumerist decay precede Ellis by a decade, and Palahniuk by two!

 

The novel tracks an enigmatic American tourist moving through sex clubs in after-hours Tokyo. He is possibly a serial killer, as his 20-year-old guide and the protagonist fears. Do those fears come true and how!

 

Buy In The Miso Soup here. 

 

*****

 

Amygdalatropolis by BR Yeager

 

Who are incels? You may have read about them in vanilla thinkpieces in liberal-minded American magazines or via alarmist Twitter/X posts blaming them for Donald Trump. But what does an incel do all day? What does he think? What does he want from life? Where are his parents?

 

Amygdalatropolis is a disturbing, hallucinatory look at a lonely, nihilistic shut-in who spends all his time on online porn, toxic chatrooms, and violent fantasies. He barely steps out of his room. He cannot process real-life interactions with his parents. The novel steadily and excruciatingly devolves into a horrifying phantasmagoria that evokes terror and pity in equal measure.

 

Buy Amygdalatropolis here.

 

*****

 

Terminal Park by Gary J Shipley

 

Possibly the weirdest and most difficult read on this list, this begins where Amygdalatropolis ends. In this novel's nightmarish reality, the world is eating into itself as humans start literally splitting into two selves, causing uncontrollable overpopulation. As hordes kill and destroy each other all over, an ex-philosophy professor takes shelter in a luxury tower apartment in Mumbai, looking upon the world in glazed bewilderment. 

 

The prose has to be read to be believed.

 

Humans ran and ran until there wasn’t room to run, till the gasses of the dead pinched at their lungs, till the planet was an open grave, and its topographies precluded anything but staggering or crawling.

 

He watched the ground vomit and swallow itself over and over: a repulsive human fountain recycling its contents, absorbing more.

 

Humanity was abased as much by its imploded imagination as by the bits of freshly dead human it was forced to eat to stay alive. And so perverse that this universal solidarity should arrive only to find that this newly united thing must kill itself – for the sake of itself.

 

Buy Terminal Park here.

 

*****

 

Graphic novels

 

Black Hole by Charles Burns

 

We can all agree adolescence is scary. There is so much rage, shame, lust, and hurt constantly bombarding your spiritual self. This time is not for the meek. Charles Burns finds a metaphor in a body-transforming sexually transmitted disease for the black hole of teenagehood. The STD leads to grotesque mutations for its victims, who isolate themselves and start living in the woods. Locked in between is a coming-of-age story of two teens.

 

Buy Black Hole here.

 

*****

 

From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell

 

If the greatest graphic novelist of all time, the mind that gave us Watchmen and V for Vendetta, is tackling Jack The Ripper, this definitely is not going to be a straightforward story of a serial killer.

 

Moore turns Ripper’s lore into a dark meditation on power, misogyny, and the birth of modernity. Through meticulously researched detail, Moore reconstructs Victorian London as a city of filth, class division, and spiritual rot.

 

A conceptually chilling theory Moore postulates here is a connection between Victorian patriarchy and the genocidal military-industrial complex that ushered in fascism into the modern world. Around the time the Ripper begins murdering women, Adolf Hitler's parents set about conceiving him. Months later, when the Ripper finishes his murders, he has visions of Hitler being born, the Nazi concentration camps, and the World Wars.

 

Buy From Hell here. 

 

*****

 

Nonfiction

 

The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus by Richard Preston

 

Can non-fiction give you sleepless nights? Richard Preston's research into the origins of Ebola virus in Africa and the efforts to tackle it makes for harrowing and often sensational reading. Sample this.

 

Ebola Zaire attacks every organ and tissue in the human body except skeletal muscle and bone. It is a perfect parasite because it transforms virtually every part of the body into a digested slime of virus particles. The seven mysterious proteins that, assembled together, make up the Ebola-virus particle, work as a relentless machine, a molecular shark, and they consume the body as the virus makes copies of itself. Small blood clots begin to appear in the bloodstream, and the blood thickens and slows, and the clots begin to stick to the walls of blood vessels. This is known as pavementing, because the clots fit together in a mosaic. The mosaic thickens and throws more clots, and the clots drift through the bloodstream into the small capillaries, where they get stuck. This shuts off the blood supply to various parts of the body, causing dead spots to appear in the brain, liver, kidneys, lungs, intestines, testicles, breast tissue (of men as well as women), and all through the skin.

 

Buy The Hot Zone here.

 

*****

 

The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti

 

If the biosphere conspires against the human race every decade with a fresh influx of viruses, like Ebola and Covid, it cannot be blamed. Master Weird fiction writer Thomas Ligotti, a compatriot of Cisco and Evenson, argues in this philosophical treatise that the best thing humans can do is to stop breeding, vanish into oblivion, and leave the world behind in peace. Unnerving on first read, amusing after three to four re-reads.

 

Here's Ligotti dropping fire bars.

 

As history confirms, people will change their minds about almost anything, from which god they worship to how they style their hair. But when it comes to existential judgments, human beings in general have an unfalteringly good opinion of themselves and their condition in this world and are steadfastly confident they are not a collection of self-conscious nothings.

 

Buy The Conspiracy Against the Human Race here.

 

*****

 

Devarsi Ghosh is Consultant Editor at Advisory.