We’re big fans of the macabre here at the Toronto Guardian, having previously devoted extended column space to our favourite scary movies and scariest games – alongside a host of features on haunted houses, spooky TV series, and more.
Picking up where our previous “No One Can Hear You Scream” left off, we thought it might be fun this year to go right back to the origins of scary fiction, with our favourite works of spooky literature. And we want to be very clear about something: we do mean scary, as in, we challenge anyone to read any of these and not feel the shivers run up and down their spine, the hairs stand on the back of their neck.
We do offer one caveat, however, which is that a lot of the truly terrifying literary works are short stories, rather than full-blooded novels. If we went simply by scariest books, it would probably be this big fat volume of Classic Tales of Horror sitting here on our desk (and in which many of the below stories can be found).
But that would be cheating, and nowhere near as fun as stocking up on a bookshelf’s worth of horrifying classics. As such, we’ve chosen to highlight the best individual works – stories, yes, but novels too – that have given us nightmares over the years, and which serve to demonstrate that many of the best scares are the ones which live in our imagination.
Best read by flashlight, late at night, in a tent somewhere deep in the woods, here are choices for:
The Scariest Books Ever Written
The Premature Burial (1844, Edgar Allan Poe)
Much of Poe’s work has, sad to say, dated out of truly frightening the modern reader, though he remains the undisputed master of the macabre and, just as importantly, a brilliant literary writer who almost single-handedly elevated so-called genre fiction.
Poe’s Premature Burial, originally published in 1844 and since repackaged in countless compendiums, is probably the most dependably terrifying of his many wonderful short stories. Taking excruciating advantage of our shared horror of being buried alive – for which there was something of a collective mania in the 19th century – Burial functions as a kind of survey of instances of live burials, as recounted by Poe.
While that might not sound like much, these stories (real? invented? Poe deliberately blurs the line) are retold so effectively that you may wind up struggling to fall asleep after reading, fearful of where you may wake up.
Dracula (1897, Bram Stoker)
Vampires are so deeply ingrained in popular culture, it’s easy to be skeptical about the work that popularized our conception of these bat-like, Eastern European-accented, castle-dwelling creatures.
Rest assured, however, that Stoker’s Dracula – not the first vampire novel, but easily the one to which modern vampire fiction owes the greatest debt – is just as, if not more scary, than the vast majority of the bloodsucking films, TV shows, or video games you’re accustomed to.
An epistolary novel, Dracula thrives in both the immediacy of its accounts – each chapter is a new diary entry, or letter, or hastily-scribbled note from the terrified perspective of someone grappling with some new horror – and from its tantalizing lacunae, those moments when a diary entry ends, “I’ve just heard a noise…”, only for the next chapter to leap several weeks ahead, to a letter from a different character, wondering what happened to the last one…
The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902, Arthur Conan Doyle)
The Sherlock Holmes stories are not, as a rule, scary, despite the copious amounts of shed blood, poisons ingested, and other terrible things which occur in the dark.
That said, Baskervilles has always stood out both for the sheer terror evoked by its best sequences – notably, any time Holmes or Watson are exploring the foggy moor, which tends to resist definition – and for its quasi-supernatural element, the title canine which may or may not be something more than a very big guard dog.
(Do yourselves a favour, however, and avoid the sloppy reimagining, Hounds of the Baskerville – note the plural Hounds – from the otherwise quite good Cumberbatch Sherlock.)
The Willows (1907, Algernon Blackwood)
A kind of proto-Blair Witch, Blackwood’s deviously creepy novella starts evocatively enough, with a pair of friends canoeing(!) down the Danube, only to encounter a fierce windstorm which forces them to take refuge on a small island at the river’s centre.
Soon enough, the island – crowded over with the titular trees – reveals itself to be something far removed from a safe haven, with plentiful weird sights and sounds to terrify the poor souls trapped there overnight. At times, The Willows almost borders on the psychedelic, with extraordinary depictions of the things which may or may not be happening on the island and in the roaring river which flows alongside, and the profound effect this all has on its terrified narrator.
Rebecca (1938, Daphne du Maurier)
Spine-tinglingly eerie, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) is a masterpiece of slow-burn storytelling and the scariest book which is not, in fact, a horror novel.
Heavily inspired by Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (itself pretty spooky at times), Rebecca is a mystery and Gothic romance wrapped up in one, with first-person narration – by a never-named narrator, no less – which expertly draws readers into its finely drawn world of creaky mansions, forgotten boathouses, and whispers in the night.
Mrs. Danvers, the closest the book has to a villain-figure, is one of the all-time great literary creations, just as the Manderley estate is one of its greatest settings. No film or television adaptation has ever done Rebecca justice, though we’d be lying if we didn’t find the idea of an opera intriguing.
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Finished these scariest books and looking for more eerie endorsements, spooky suggestions? Look no further than our guides to the scariest films ever made, and the scariest video games to play alongside them.
