Five Weird Horror Novels for a Good Bad Time

Start the Halloween season the right way with a refreshing dose of horror and malaise.

Something wicked..

Halloween is just around the corner, and here at The Problem Store, we couldn’t be more excited. We’re excited to provide our community with both fresh and fermented problems in the form of novels that insinuate themselves into the reader’s peripheral consciousness, cast an ominous air across the usual mundanity, and expand one’s mental universe via distortions of reality. Or something like that. Our excellent curator of literature and nightmares, KHRC, has compiled a brief list of excellent weird horror novels that give seriously unsettling vibes. Perfect for reading in an abandoned cemetery, deep in the dark woods, or at home all alone during a furious fall storm, these books put the CRE(E)P in crepuscular and are sure to leave you feeling odd and a little bit empty. 

Jawbone - Mònica Ojeda (trans. Sarah Booker):

Mònica Ojeda maintains a frenzied intensity from beginning to end in this crooked coming-of-age story—the novel cycles between cynical teenager Fernanda Astudillo and eclectic Spanish teacher Clara López Valverde, whose stories converge in a shocking series of events. Fernanda acts as deputy to her bestie, Annelise, the leader of a precocious group of girlies who stumble upon an abandoned building in the woods on an ordinary afternoon in Guayaquil, Ecuador. The building becomes their sacred space, an escape from the uncomfortable transition period between adolescence and young adulthood, where they can indulge in childish games and challenges. Soon enough, things take a sinister turn, as so often happens in high school; following Annelise’s lead, the girls offer libations to the White God while incorporating increasingly elaborate, disturbing rituals into their play. Meanwhile, Miss Clara, their seriously disturbed Spanish teacher, is hanging on by a thread following a traumatic event. At the heart of the novel is the complicated, sometimes sapphic relationship between Fernanda and Annelise, which is at once painfully intimate and antagonistic. Jawbone explores the liminal space that young women occupy as they leave the relative safety of childhood behind, exploring the dangerous consequences of suppressed anger, apprehension, and desire that often come with the fraught territory of adolescence. Written with vigor and originality that demonstrates a deep love of language, Jawbone is at turns creepy, nauseating, and hilarious. It’s one of the best novels our humble editorial staff has encountered in recent years and will surely set an appropriately macabre tone for the season.  

The Last Man - Mary Shelley:

Mary Shelley obviously knows a thing or two about horror. Her more famous first novel, Frankenstein, and its myriad adaptations have inspired generations of readers and viewers to consider questions of creation, birth, and the existential horrors suggested by breakthroughs in science and technology. The Last Man deals with another perennial source of torment: plague and the end of the world. Uncannily relevant to a post-COVID society, this melancholic, lonely novel is set far in the future in an England that hasn’t changed much–they have zeppelins, and that’s about it. In fact, Greece and Turkey are still at war, and valiant poet-warriors are still rushing off to the venerable Greeks’ aid, earning everyone’s breathless admiration. Shelley began working on The Last Man following the deaths of Percy Shelley and three of her four children; during the drafting process, Lord Byron, her close friend, also died (incidentally in the course of gallantly rushing to aid the Greeks). Her mother, legendary feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, died ten days after birthing Mary Shelley, which instilled in Shelley a lasting sense of survivor’s guilt and loneliness, problems which were only exacerbated with each new loss. When she wrote her apocalyptic novel, she truly felt like ‘the last man,’ having survived almost every person who meant anything to her. It’s a heavy, desolate tale written in florid prose that will continue to haunt anyone who reads it for a long time after. But it is also a novel that celebrates human resiliency in the face of total loss while providing timeless insight into how society continues to function amid war and plague.

Our Share of Night - Mariana Enriquez (trans. Megan McDowell):

A modern-day eldritch horror combined with a journalist’s insight into the very real horrors of recent history, this family saga is not for those with a weak stomach. Separated into four distinct perspectives, it tells the tale of a single family struggling to detach from a powerful, depraved cult. The cult, comprised of rich and powerful members of Argentina’s upper crust, worships a Lovecraftian monstrosity from another dimension—despite a fundamental inability to comprehend what it is and what it wants, they remain determined that eventually, it will grant them everlasting life. Why anybody would want that is beyond me, but it does seem to be a preoccupation that the most privileged members of society share. What could possibly go wrong? Enriquez has described her novel as political horror, which is a fitting description in many ways. Set in the years before and after Argentina’s ‘Dirty War,’ it examines the atrocities that people are willing to commit for the sake of power. Real-life horrors of corruption, poverty, and hopelessness blend with cosmic horrors until they become indistinguishable. What corrupt leaders of society get away with is often more grotesque than anything out of fiction (though imbunche are pretty damn grotesque). The winding narrative recalls the directionless nature of suffering, yet its powerful moments of human connection provide a balm to the ruthless claws of history. 

Don’t forget to check out her upcoming collection of short stories, A Sunny Place for Shady People, scheduled for release later this month!

House of Leaves - Mark W. Danielewski:

Call us pretentious, call us slaves to a shallow gimmick, but House of Leaves remains one of the creepiest modern novels in existence. Its reputation as a mind-bending headache with unreadable typesetting and way, way too many footnotes may be somewhat warranted, but at its core, it is a story about a haunted house and man’s search for meaning inside that house, and also living with mental illness in an unsympathetic world, and maybe also the labyrinthine, interconnected nature of the Western Canon, or the eerie effect of liminal spaces, or the addictive, all-consuming pursuit of art…maybe it’s just a story about a guy who meets a girl who happens to be a stripper whose main personality trait is having a cartoon rabbit tattooed on her ass. Its Borgesian citational method emphasizes literature’s role in shaping reality, while the dry, quasi-intellectual tone in the main body of text pokes fun at the overly serious, self-important navel-gazing commonly found in academia. There are stories within stories here, jumping between a directionless nitwit living in LA and a struggling family who has the misfortune of moving into a house that’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside; both of these sections can be polarizing, but as it progresses, the narrative rewards its readers with moments so uncanny that grabbing a tape measure just to make sure begins to sound like a better and better idea. 

The Employees - Olga Ravn (trans. Martin Aitken)

For fans of Scavenger’s Reign, this slim novel consists of brief statements taken from workers aboard a spaceship following a failed mission. Through these short but evocative episodes, we catch glimpses of the strange world that they inhabit, the burgeoning conflicts between different forms of consciousness simmering in the background as the workers describe their interactions with the alien objects that led their mission to disaster. Ravn creates a surreal, hypnotic atmosphere in crisp, poetic prose, while the fragmented narrative forms an illuminating puzzle that raises questions of autonomy, intelligence, and consciousness. In a time when AI is quickly being incorporated into every aspect of society, these considerations are as timely as they are unsettling.

Honorable mention: Annihilation - Jeff VanderMeer: TFW the outside gets inside. While Annihilation gives strong summer vibes, this contemporary classic of surreal eco-horror is always worth mentioning. Keep an eye out for more in-depth discussion of this and the rest of VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy in the lead-up to his upcoming release of Absolution, a fourth Southern Reach installment (while trilogies traditionally consist of three installments, novelists have more important things to worry about than learning how to count), scheduled for October 22, just in time to ride the wave of Halloween revelry to its ultimate completion.