5 Scary Books to Read This Halloween (Plus 100 more)

'Let’s Go Play At The Adams’' by Mendal W. Johnson

In rural Maryland twenty-something babysitter Barbara is held captive by the very children she is supposed to be looking after while their parents are on holiday in Europe. Out in the middle of nowhere the children are free to explore and push their sadism, lust and desires.

I’m sure many of you are familiar with Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door (1989) based on the torture and murder of Sylvia Likens. However, you may not know Mendal W. Johnson’s sole novel, Let’s Go Play At The Adams’, based on the same case. It was Joseph D’Lacey (FYI, I recommend his novel MEAT) who first put me onto Let’s Go Play At The Adams’, lending me a dog-eared copy of the book and challenging me to read it. And that’s exactly what Let’s Go Play At The Adams’ is – a challenge, but in the best (and at times worst) possible sense.

It’s not quite as timeless as The Girl Next Door and on occasion comes across as a product of its time, but don’t let that put you off. It’s a master class in tension. Essentially, in its nearly three-hundred pages, it depicts the unrelenting torture inflicted upon helpless babysitter Barbara. Just when you think it cannot go any further or get any worse, it does. On the surface it sounds gratuitous, but it isn’t. Let’s Go Play At The Adams' is masterfully done, it refuses to flinch away from the on-page atrocities, and as such ensures your heart rate is elevated throughout. You would think Let’s Go Play At The Adams’ wouldn’t live up to the borderline ridiculous unattributed praise slathered on the front cover, “a novel more terrifying than Lord of the Flies & The Exorcist combined”. Remarkably it does.

[amazon 0586042334 inline]

'Piercing' by Ryu Murakami

Piercing follows twenty-nine year old Kawashima Masayuki who suffers from anxiety attacks. A decade ago he stabbed his former lover to alleviate the anxiety. Now, with anxiety mounting once more, he’s scared he might attack his own daughter. So he decides to kill a prostitute instead. Unfortunately for Kawashima, his would-be victim is just as disturbed and traumatised as he is…

If you haven’t read anything by Ryū Murakami you’re missing out. Like a Japanese sex-addicted Jim Thompson, Murakami really is a master of capturing so much in so few words. The juxtaposition of everyday life and Kawashima Masayuki's chaotic mind works wonderfully. The character's comfortable home life and the smell of freshly made bread is interwoven with his ever-increasing anxiety and the constant fear he might bludgeon his own daughter to death. There’s something delightful, too, in the way he casually regales readers with extreme violence and his murderous intentions, as if reading a shopping list. Add to all this the misdirection, self-references and instantly recognisable details about Tokyo and its surrounding prefectures and you have something very special indeed.

There was no way to be one hundred per cent sure of not getting caught – this had been his first thought on waking – but merely wounding some woman was out of the question. If she lived, she’d surely go to the police, and that would be it for him. He’d mulled over such problems while brushing his teeth and washing his face.

–Ryū Murakami, Piercing

[amazon 014303863X inline]

'Hell House' by Richard Matheson

Rolf Rudolph Deutsch is going die. But when Deutsch, a wealthy magazine and newspaper publisher, starts thinking seriously about his impending death, he offers to pay a physicist and two mediums, one physical and one mental, $100,000 each to establish the facts of life after death. Dr. Lionel Barrett, the physicist, accompanied by the mediums, travel to the Belasco House in Maine, which has been abandoned and sealed since 1949 after a decade of drug addiction, alcoholism, and debauchery. For one night, Barrett and his colleagues investigate the Belasco House and learn exactly why the townfolks refer to it as the Hell House.

I’m surprised Matheson’s haunted house masterpiece hasn’t made the cut in any of the previous LitReactor ‘best of’ lists. Stephen King has praised it on several occasions, too. He writes, “Hell House is the scariest haunted house novel ever written. It looms over the rest the way the mountains loom over the foothills.” Despite numerous contenders such as Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Sarah Langan’s Audrey’s Door (technically a haunted apartment novel) I’m inclined to agree with King. Much like Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts, Matheson’s Hell House refuses to draw definitive conclusions, forcing the reader to choose which characters’ interpretations of Hell House they believe. With short chapters and a pace that mirrors Matheson's The Twilight Zone episodes, you may just find yourself reading Hell House in a single-sitting.

If you only knew the beauty which awaits you, Daniel. If you only knew how lovely are the realms which lie beyond this house. Would you keep yourself locked in a barren cell when all the beauties of the universe await you on the outside?

–Richard Matheson, Hell House

[amazon 0312868855 inline]

'Disintegration' by Richard Thomas

A suburban husband and father loses everything. He retains only a few keepsakes of his former life. Memories of a man who no longer exists. Booze and an affair with a beautiful woman provide little relief, with the only meaning left in his life coming from his assignments. An envelope slipped under the door of his apartment with the name and address of an unpunished evildoer. The unspoken directive to kill. And every time he does, he marks the occasion with a memento: a tattoo. He has a lot of tattoos.

On the surface Disintegration by Richard Thomas might appear the odd one out on this list. After all it doesn’t fit so snuggly into the ‘horror’ box. Dig a little deeper, though, and the horror is abundantly clear. If I could describe Disintegration in a single word it would be ‘heavy’. This mirrors the weight the story’s protagonist has to carry. His wife deceased, but for her final answer machine message, the unnamed anti-hero has nothing left to lose. His grief transcends sorrow – devoid of feelings. He’s a serial killer but one with rules, though he’s nothing like Dexter and for the most part the novel contains neither humour nor light relief. If you want to feel darkness, to experience the essence of an utterly broken man, this is for you. Disintegration works so well and is scary because the unnamed narrator could be anyone and everyone. It makes us consider our own existence, to question just how far we are from losing it all and what we would do. 

There is no past. My heart was ripped from me in a rush of flashing lights and sticky yellow tape. There is no future. Vision would require hope, and that stealthy whore eludes me at every turn. So I float in the ether, pasty skin crawling with regret, eyes gouged out by my own shaking hands.

–Richard Thomas, Disintegration

[amazon B00N6PEWFA inline]

'NOS4A2' by Joe Hill

Victoria McQueen has a secret gift for finding things: a misplaced bracelet, a missing photograph, answers to unanswerable questions. On her Raleigh Tuff Burner bike, she makes her way to a rickety covered bridge that, within moments, takes her wherever she needs to go. Charles Talent Manx has a way with children. He likes to take them for rides in his 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith with the NOS4A2 vanity plate. With his old car, he can slip right out of the everyday world, and onto the hidden roads that transport them to an astonishing – and terrifying – playground of amusements he calls Christmasland. Then, one day, Vic goes looking for trouble—and finds Manx. That was a lifetime ago. Now Vic, the only kid to ever escape Manx’s unmitigated evil, is all grown up and desperate to forget. But Charlie Manx never stopped thinking about Victoria McQueen. He’s on the road again and he’s picked up a new passenger: Vic’s own son.

As far as I’m concerned Joe Hill has released four must-read books, and if this were an ‘essential reads’ column any of the books could have easily made the list. Horns is more grounded in dark fantasy than outright horror, and as a varied story collection that transcends genres and styles 20th Century Ghosts would have been an odd pick. That said it was difficult deciding between his first novel, Heart-Shaped Box, and his latest, NOS4A2.

By the slimmest of margins, NOS4A2 scrapes ahead—it takes place in a fully realised world and the characters are that much more memorable. Like a modern-day Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Charles Manx—complete with his Rolls-Royce Wraith—is a larger-than-life maniacal genius practically begging for a film adaptation or spin-off television series. Of course, the promise of Christmasland for the unlucky children Manx lures into his car only adds to the sense of unease, given the prevalence of child abduction headlines today. Certainly not a slender read, at seven-hundred-plus pages, a lesser writer may have produced a flabbier book with unnecessary exposition and filler. This is not the case with NOS4A2. Instead we are given a dual narrative flashing between 1986 and the present day, and meaningful subplots. Like protagonist Vic McQueen, we’re always on-edge wondering when and waiting for Charles Manx’s Wraith to appear over the horizon…

[amazon 0062200585 inline]