Four Horror Books Behind Me
Spooky reads for your Halloween consideration
Behind every book is more books. Each time I write a new novel, I’m simultaneously reading and discovering books with similar themes or elements.
For my forthcoming novel, Acid Christmas, due out this November 15th, I drew inspiration from many genres, including horror.
While Acid Christmas is more speculative fiction, it contains intentional horror elements, including the “trapped” setting. Like the novels The Shining, and One by One, the book takes place in a gnarly winter snowstorm, but instead of being isolated in a rural hotel or a fancy Swiss ski chalet, our characters find themselves locked with the masses in the Toronto Pearson airport and its attached sub-par airport hotel. This narrow confinement is common in horror stories, which often hold people captive with a dangerous element they can’t escape from.
So, since it’s Halloween week, let’s take a closer look at some of the horror books I read while writing and editing Acid Christmas. Maybe you will give one a try.
Today, I’ll be looking back on:
Thirst, by Nicholas Powers
Below, by Lauren Hightower
Ghost Wall, by Sarah Moss
Taaqtumi: An Anthology of Arctic Horror Stories, edited by Aviaq Johnston
NYC Vampires, Mental Illness, Dope Art, and Political Allegory: Thirst
“In the lake center was the First One, the oldest vampire, a twisted fleshy tower that held them together. It radiated their whole history and their plan for the future. She studied the dark currents that flowed by her lips. The trees on the shore that lashed out at her like angry mops. Rage spiked in her blood. The plan was clear. They wanted to kill us for centuries, and we gave them the means to do it. Nuclear war.”
- Nicholas Powers, Thirst
I’ve written about Thirst before and interviewed its author, Nicholas Powers, but this is a horror book for the politically minded. It is less scary, less slasher than most horror books, but still fits within the genre.
The tale takes place in present-day NYC, and we follow a teenage girl suffering from an undefined mental illness, something like schizophrenia, or acute bipolar. Her parents are medicating her and her life is a real struggle. She can’t make friends. She’s constantly stressed and bullied.
Then one day, she meets a boy, and he convinces her to go off her meds. That’s when she realizes that the spirits she’s been seeing like shadows in the corners of the city and on top of buildings aren’t figments of her imagination. She isn’t crazy. She has a gift: she can see vampires, and not just any vampires, but space vampires bent on occupying select humans and feeding on others, all in the pursuit of wealth and power, to ultimately rule Earth. One of the people the vampires occupy is clearly a fictionalized Donald Trump.
This horror novel is a hardcore trip, chock full of metaphors and allegories with the most amazing art and illustrations I’ve ever seen in a paperback novel. I also loved how it played with concepts around mental illness vs neurodivergence, and, of course, alien vampires.
❆ How is Thirst related to Acid Chirstmas? Both feature political metaphors, psychedelic imagery, and drug use.
West Virginia Road Trip Creature Horror: Below
“She’d nearly convinced herself she’d imagined the presence, the closeness above, when her right hand brushed something leathery, soft, and warm before it receded into darkness.”
- Lauren Hightower, Below.
I heard about Below, by Kentucky author Lauren Hightower on a booktuber’s horror roundup and decided to read it based solely on the fact that the story takes place in West Virginia, near where I grew up.
Below follows a recently separated, single woman on a road trip heading west, through good ole’, mountainous, and winding West Virginia. I don’t want to give too much away, but she has one strange encounter after another and makes friends with a trucker. The story literally goes downhill from there, but not in the way you expect.
Ugh, I’m still disturbed. This novel left me pondering one of the worst scenarios I’ve ever imagined. The book was truly scary and I wouldn’t recommend reading it alone in the woods. It was also a super fast read; I finished it in one evening, my eyes glued to the twisted page.
❆ How is Below related to Acid Chirstmas? They both contain bad storms and solo-female travel.
Men Take Cosplay Way Too Far: Ghost Wall
“Who are the ghosts again, we or our dead? Maybe they imagined us first, maybe we were conjured out of the deep past by other minds.”
- Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall
Ghost Wall was like Lord of the Flies but with adult academics and autodidacts. This unsettling, short novel follows a family with a patriarchal father hell-bent on recreating the Iron Age in rural England. For vacations, the family does frontier cosplay and larps the old world by camping with only the means of that era. On one trip, they invite university students and a professor studying the Iron Age to join them. Of course, it doesn’t go well.
I picked this book because a BookTuber said it was like the A24 movie Midsommar and I LOVED that movie. I also enjoy the schadenfreude of city folks trying to live off-grid and failing.
However, I wasn’t expecting Ghost Wall to be about domestic/child abuse, which it was, and I probably wouldn’t have read it had I known, as I prefer horror that can’t happen in real life.
Like Midsommar, it has grad students, toxic relationships, and a rural/trapped setting, but all the other things Midsommar did so well—the tension, the anxiety, the true horror, the unforgettable imagery—this book didn’t achieve for me.
The sentences were beautiful, but because I was expecting horror with supernatural elements, and instead got a literary fiction family drama novella, I wasn’t satisfied. Though, I’d still recommend it to anyone who likes literary fiction and can handle domestic violence.
❆ How is Ghost Wall related to Acid Christmas? Both novels contain a “locked-in” element where the characters are trapped or isolated from the rest of the world.
Mystical Polar Bears, Flying Vaginas, and Killer Cold: Taaqtumi
“It’s true what you’d tell me about Northern hospitality: the weather is cold, but the hearts are warm… At one point, I looked up and the wolverine had stopped snarling. It was sitting there, silently watching me dissect my friend.”
- Jay Bulckaert, from “The Wildest Game,” in Taaqtumi: An Anthology of Arctic Horror Stories
At one point while writing Acid Christmas, which features an intense Canadian blizzard, I searched for other books involving brutal Canadian winters and discovered Taaqtumi: An Anthology of Arctic Horror Stories, edited by Aviaq Johnston. This unique anthology features nine short stories written by northern writers.
“Taaqtumi” is an Inuktitut word that means “in the dark,” and all the stories take place in Canada. Most are written by indigenous authors and feature indigenous characters. Of the four books discussed here, I’d recommend this one the most for fans of horror.
Stories varied in horror level, but #7, #8, and #9 were VERY dark and gruesome.
The story premises were as follows:
Iqsinaqtutalik Piqtuq: Children navigate a haunted blizzard.
The Door: A man finds a mysterious door alone on the tundra.
Wheetago War II: Students at a bush school are revisited by an ancient world of giant animals and shapeshifters.
Revenge: A bitter, outcast man summons a mythical killer polar bear to exact revenge on his village.
Lounge: Set in the far future, a group of researchers and artificial beings travel to a remote Arctic mine to study its unusual emergent properties, but their trust in each other unravels during a party one of the scientists hosts in VR. (This is where the flying vagina comes in.)
Utiqtuq: Displaced by a Zombie pandemic, an indigenous girl must choose between a primitive life of safety in the Baffin Islands, or a dangerous, but tantalizing opportunity to return to the infected regions of Ontario to find her separated family.
Sila: Climate change causes dangerous, hungry polar bears to migrate south to hunt humans.
The Wildest Game: A frustrated ad exec in Toronto moves to Yellowknife to pursue a life of cannibalism.
Strays: An Ambient-addicted veterinarian with a disturbing past travels to a remote town to perform pet surgeries, but finds herself unable to separate nightmares from reality.
Lounge was my favorite story and the longest of the anthology. I could have kept reading an entire novel with the same characters.
If you like dark, bodily horror set in the frozen hellscapes with many animal elements, unfamiliar cultures, and new words and mythologies to explore, Taaqtumi is for you. It was visceral and very physical, truly chilling.
❆ How is Taaqtumi related to Acid Christmas? Both are set in Canada in a harsh winter and both contain supernatural/climate/horror elements.
Now You
Do you like horror novels? What are your favorites?
Which horror books did you read this year?
Which one of these books sounds good to you?
These books sounds lovely, including yours!