These stories vary in theme and intent, with some set in the distant future, while others reflect day-to-day anxieties in a relatable way. Sometimes, literal monsters become metaphors for pestilence and xenophobia in classics like Dracula. In other cases, the source of fear is intangible, like in The Last House on Needless Street, where trauma shapes an unreliable protagonist.
Horror books also challenge problematic societal norms and help cultivate empathy for extreme situations. To that end, there is no dearth of horror classics essential to our understanding of the genre. Even so, here are five essential horror books — meant to appeal to a range of genre sensibilities — that you must read at least once in your life.
Popular culture considers Bram Stoker’s Dracula the definitive vampire novel, but Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla predates it by more than two decades. This underrated Gothic novella influenced key aspects of Stoker’s celebrated novel while featuring one of the first female vampires in fiction. Carmilla is set in 19th-century Styria, where a young woman named Laura develops a strange friendship with the unpredictable Carmilla, who looks and acts like a mortal woman — for the most part.
This dynamic is unambiguously sexually charged, making Carmilla a foundational text in queer literature, even though Le Fanu’s interpretation is quite conservative. Carmilla herself is a complex enigma. A woman of aristocratic origins, she only targets mortal women and lures them into obsessive relationships that end in tragedy.
Traditional tropes of vampirism are also present, such as Carmilla’s ability to turn into a beast or her tendency to manipulate victims. Le Fanu also uses a suffocating atmosphere to build tension and fear, which intensifies as Laura doesn’t know what we know about Carmilla’s true nature. Beyond its scope as a fast-paced horror novella, Carmilla is a solid exploration of how Victorian society treated female sexuality and pathologized it.
Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House is a heartbreaking meditation on grief that significantly diverges from Shirley Jackson’s source material. Jackson’s Gothic horror novel treats Hill House like a malevolent entity that actively orchestrates events affecting protagonist Eleanor Vance. An investigator of the supernatural, John Montague, invites Eleanor along with artist Theodora and Hill House heir Luke Sanderson to determine whether the estate or its grounds are haunted.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
