Our favorite creeps have taken over Production Central

BY ANGEL MELANSON

Originally published in 1954, The Bad Seed was an instant bestseller and finalist for the National Book Award. It’s eerily plausible and a wholly disturbing portrait of a seemingly innocent little girl named Rhoda, who always seems to be at the center of terrible accidents. Her mother’s realization that Rhoda may actually be the cause of the so-called accidents and her own potential hand in that sits at the novel’s controversial and unsettling center. The Bad Seed implacably builds toward its shocking climax in a way that few other similar novels have matched.

Shirley Jackson gets a lot of (well-deserved) love and respect these days as a major talent in midcentury horror and mystery, but we should spare a thought for the criminally underappreciated Angela Carter. The Bloody Chamber is her best-known work and a natural starting point: a collection of unsettling fairy tale retellings that highlight women’s rage, sexuality, and the often-monstrous nature of love and desire. The titular story is based on the traditional French folktale of “Bluebeard;” other stories in the collection draw from “Beauty and the Beast,” “Puss in Boots,” “Sleeping Beauty,” and “Little Red Riding Hood.” These tales vary in length and tone, but you can count on Gothic elements, body horror, and strong, unflinching female characters throughout.

Clive Barker‘s particular brand of wholly bleak horror positioned him as one of contemporary horror’s most influential voices. It all began with the Books of Blood, a six volume collection of short stories. The first volume garnered a World Fantasy Award and laid the template for Barker’s style tales of everyday people caught up in horrifying and unapologetically grotesque situations far beyond their control. If you’ve never experienced Clive Barker, this is the place to start.

A detective tale turned horror story, “The Call of Cthulhu” follows an investigator who is unwittingly pulled into an underworld of forbidden cults, madness, and horrors at sea. A snapshot of a world on the edge of chaos, this tale illustrates the pan-psychic horror of Lovecraft’s ancient gods better than any other tale he wrote, and gives the reader a taste of what is to come when The Stars Are Right.

There are many incredible Stephen King novels, but Carrie was his first and remains our favorite. The best part is that the true horror of the novel isn’t what Carrie can do it’s what she endured before it finally overwhelmed her. And it has the added bonus of the most memorable dance scene of all time.

Two priests are called in to examine a girl who might be possessed by the devil. The Exorcist, right? Nope, it’s Ray Russell‘s The Case Against Satan, a novel of theological horror that beat William Peter Blatty’s book to print by eight years. The Case Against Satan is as much the story of a crisis of faith as it is a supernatural tale, and readers looking for a nuanced take on both should give it a try.

Apollo Kagwa’s excitement to become the father he never had to his own newborn son transforms into a parent’s worst nightmare when his wife and child are torn away and Apollo becomes determined to bring them back. LaValle brings a piece of classic Western European folklore to the modern day, a cautionary fairy tale and a stunningly creepy horror story all in one.

At some point in your life, you’ve likely done something and then forgotten about it later. So begins Sara Gran‘s odd and eerie novel, Come Closer, as she’s called in to her boss’s office to explain a series of quite offensive insults written on a report she submitted to him. Later that night, a quiet but persistent tapping is heard throughout her and her husband’s home. What follows is a series of events that will keep you up late at night, turning page after page as the dread sinks into your bones.

Following a run-in with the police, a regular working guy named Pepper finds himself committed to a psychiatric hospital. His rebellious nature gets him in trouble with the staff and many of the patients alike, some of whom believe that a monsters stalks the hospital’s halls. Pepper dismisses their stories at first, but that changes the night he sees the thing for himself. Now Pepper has a choice between going along with the program, or doing something about a terror the staff seems all too willing to ignore.

It’s been well over a century since its publication, but this novel has lost none of its bite. Dracula is the definitive vampire tale, but it’s so much more than that, too. It’s a story of modern technology versus ancient superstition, Victorian mores versus barely sublimated sexuality… the list goes on and on. If you’ve never read Dracula, then it’s probably time you should.

Trevor McGee had a rough childhood, you could say — when he was just five years old, he woke up one morning to find that his father had murdered his mother and his younger brother, and then hanged himself. Twenty years later, McGee returns to the house he grew up in, but it seems the demons that drove his father to insanity may not have left…

Caitlin R. Kiernan is an expert at incorporating mental illness into her books in a sensitive, non-sensational way. She’s also masterful when it comes to the art of sustaining the strange and surreal and frightening and atmospheric for the full length of a novel. The Drowning Girl is part ghost story, part character study, part… something else, and is absolutely not to be missed.

Samanta Shweblin’s Fever Dream is an unsettling nightmare that will haunt you for days. While Amanda lies dying in bed, the child David — not her child — sits beside her, questioning her to find out “the exact moment when the worms come into being.” What follows is an urgent, twisted tale of ghosts and souls, toxins, and the desperate lengths that family will go for each other.

Peter Stenson’s Fiend is a zombie apocalypse novel unlike any you’ve ever read before. The protagonists are crystal meth junkies whose habit immunized them against a mysterious something that turned the rest of the world into zombies. Now, scoring more meth has become a matter of life and (un)death. Author Peter Stenson dealt with a meth habit in his past, and knows as good as anyone the damage the drug can do. Fiend is as good a metaphor for addiction as anything I’ve ever read.

This contemporary Gothic horror story is set in late 1960s England and centers on a baby named Ben who is born to Harriet and David Lovatt, the happy parents of four other children. Gruesomely goblin-like in appearance, insatiably hungry, abnormally strong, and incredibly violent, Ben is not your typical infant not by a long shot. As he grows older, Ben’s parents grow increasingly fearful of his outbursts. Deemed a dangerous monster who will never be accepted anywhere, they exile him to an institution where he suffers alone. A meditation on humanity and parenthood, this book will haunt you until the last page.

Just about every Octavia Butler work is a horror story on some level, but Fledgling‘s tale of Shori, by appearance a young Black girl with severe amnesia and in reality a vampire genetically modified to survive in sunlight, explores ignorance, bigotry, and the horror wrought by humans themselves with a timelessness that remains relevant today.

The Frangipani Hotel is a lyrical and thought-provoking collection of ghost stories that delve into the painful legacy of the Vietnam War. In these tales, the past is often intruding on the present, and the supernatural is always just around the corner. This is the perfect book to curl up with on a rainy day for a little spooky introspection.

The power of a novel can be seen in its longevity. Frankenstein is powerful indeed. While it has long been considered one of the first science fiction works, it also features terrifying ideas of the macabre and horrific, posing questions about life and death and life again.

Bubonic Plague!