When Rihanna came out with her smash hit “Disturbia” in 2008, it proved that she understood a fundamental facet of human nature: we like what unsettles us. Library shelves are haunted with novels that don’t spare the gory details, which cause many to lean in instead of check out. What is it about death and violence that so enraptures us? Like a car crash, we just can’t look away. If you’re looking for to get creeped, freaked or skeeved out, these authors have you covered. These are the 10 most disturbing horror novels ever written – you’ve been warned.
The Exorcist
Inspired by a real life story of demonic possession, William Blatty’s The Exorcist brings us face to face with one of human history’s most feared foes: the devil. Well, not Satan directly, but one of his top agents. In Washington D.C., an affluent actress sees her life run off the rails after her daughter Regan begins behaving strangely. And when I say “strangely,” I mean levitating off the bed and doing unspeakable sexual blasphemies with religious objects. Regan’s mother seeks the help of a Jesuit priest struggling with his faith, who discovers to his horror that the spiritual world he doubted is devastatingly real. At its core, this novel is about the real life horror of having a sick child – a parent’s worst nightmare. When the disease is a demon, what’s the appropriate medicine? Sacrifice, and quite a lot of it. Your sanity, your body, and potentially even your immortal soul – as the hapless priest soon finds out.
The Haunting of Hill House
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson is slow burn psychological horror, beginning with laughter and ending with tears. A bon vivant, a recluse, and a wealthy heir are called to the mysterious Hill House by a paranormal investigator determined to plumb its spiritual depths. While the group begins the quest in good spirits, the malevolent architecture soon begins to psychologically exploit their mental weaknesses, causing them to succumb to madness and despair. Don’t be fooled by the book’s patient pace, it’s one of the few works of horror that is capable of delivering jumpscares with the written word. Before reading this novel, I didn’t know that was even possible. As the sanity of the characters begins to break down while the house exploits their jealousies and desires, things get very ugly, very fast.
The Troop
The Troop by Nick Cutter revolves around a doomed group of Boy Scouts and their Scout Master, whose annual trip to the Canadian wilderness takes an unexpected turn for the worse. Their campfire tales are interrupted by a walking horror story: an emaciated man who carries a terrible infection. As the sickness spreads, the boys coming-of-age experience turns from Stand By Me to Lord of The Flies on a dime. If they intend to survive, these Boy Scouts will need lean into their baser instincts – make moral compromises that don’t win you a merit badge. Featuring copious amounts of body horror, this parable about parasitism is not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach. Animal lovers, do yourselves and favor and leave this novel on the shelf.
The Ruins
The Ruins by Scott Smith does the impossible: it makes plants horrifying. On a vacation in Mexico, a group of young people stumble across ancient ruins in the steaming jungle. After trespassing on the primordial site, they’re prevented from leaving by the local tribe that protects the place. The tribe appears to fear the ruins, and the contamination it brings. As the days pass, the group begins to feel a malevolent presence in the local plant life, one that is engineering their destruction. Hallucinatory and hopeless, this novel is an exercise in utter despair. The plants play tricks on the mind, destroying it before finally claiming the body. Is it part of their life cycle? Some necessary component of their survival? No, they just seem to enjoy it. You’ll never look at a fern or a ficus the same way again.
Penpal
Before Dathan Auerbach’s Penpal hit the shelves, it was already internet famous. Adapted from a creepypasta of the same name, the novel first made its rounds on Reddit’s r/nosleep forum. It’s the story of an unnamed narrator’s relationship to his childhood best friend Josh, one that was cut short by the boy’s mysterious disappearance. After Josh and his classmates tie letters to balloons to find penpals, Josh’s family is horrified to discover that his letter has been answered – with over 50 polaroid photos taken of him in secret. As the now adult narrator recounts his childhood, he remembers a series of seemingly innocuous occurrences that served as a prelude to Josh’s eventual vanishing. The novel’s most disturbing aspect? Not its sense of horror (though trust me, that’s there) but the overwhelming sense of sadness that seeps off the pages. Childhood nostalgia tainted by human evil, bringing goosebumps and tears alike.
Tender Is The Flesh
Tender Is The Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica is part horror, part dystopian fiction, all wrong. In a world where animal meat has been tainted by a deadly virus, our carnivorous tendencies have caused us to seek out flesh from a previously unthinkable source: ourselves. Marcos is a worker in a plant that processes “special meat” – the kind made from human beings. Though forming a relationship with any person designated as livestock is punishable by death, Marcus begins to cozy up to a woman reserved for “breeding.” As he attempts to shelter his lover, the meat-eating authorities of world begin to bear down on them both. It’s a chilling novel about our insatiable craving for living flesh, one that kills eaten and eater alike.
Blood Meridian
While any reader of Cormac McCathy knows that his American Gothic novels are no walk in the park, Blood Meridian feels more like a hands and knees crawl across a broken glass desert. It’s inspired by the real life story of the Glanton Gang, mercenaries who were paid to collect the scalps of North America’s indigenous population. An unnamed young man joins these killers on a hallucinatory quest across the Southwest, where murder for money quickly becomes force of habit. The novel’s centerpiece of horror is Judge Holden – who is seven feet tall, hairless, and white as bone. He’s a Wild West renaissance man, scientist, a scholar, a philosopher, and the most bloodthirsty of them all. Quite possibly, he’s the living embodiment of human evil – the devil himself.
Beloved
While it’s easily one of the most disturbing books on this list, calling Beloved by Toni Morrison a simple horror novel somehow does it a disservice. This Pulitzer Prize winner is a time capsule for the bleakest period of American History – the days of slavery. Inspired by the real life story of an enslaved woman who killed her child, the novel follows Sethe – who murdered her young daughter to spare her from a life of bondage. After marking the grave with the word “Beloved,” Sethe flees north to find a better life – only for Beloved’s ghost to follow her. It’s a devastating tale of American trauma, how the past continues to haunt the present, and the wounds that not even time can heal.
We Need To Talk About Kevin
If you thought The Exorcist was a parent’s worst nightmare, just wait until you get a load of Lionel Shriver’s We Need To Talk About Kevin. Even since Kevin was a little kid, his mother Eva noticed he was a little… off. His emotional distance is punctuated by episodes of casual cruelty, though his father denies that there’s anything wrong. As Kevin ages, it’s clear the something sinister lurks beneath the surface. His efforts to hurt others are becoming more sophisticated, and threaten to culminate in something truly horrible. The most terrifying aspect of this novel isn’t Kevin and his violent tendencies, but his mother’s ambivalence. She loves her son, she resents him, she fears him, and she seeks to understand him, and sometimes she wishes he was never born. It’s a deeply difficult novel about the fraught relationship between parent and child, built up to an antisocial breaking point
Geek Love
Ugh, I feel disturbed even writing a description of Geek Love by Katherine Dunn, like I’m doing something I shouldn’t. It’s the story of a mom and pop traveling circus, populated by the deformed children of its ringleaders. Aloysius Binewski and his wife Crystal are breeding a freak show for a family, the mother ingests drugs and radioactive material to deliberately induce birth defects in their children, and the father sells tickets. Told through the eyes of their hunchbacked daughter Olympia, the novel follows the Binewskis through the backroads as the search for the next audience. Featuring more body horror than you can shake a deformed limb at, Geek Love is a stomach churner family drama. Oh, and the children are also developing a cult, because why not?
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