horror you haven't read, pt. 1
Since I talk about horror and horror-adjacent topics more or less unceasingly, I’m sometimes asked for recommendations. And as I mentioned in my books for Halloween post, Googling for horror book recs is kind of a mess; presumably you have already heard of ‘Salem’s Lot and don’t need to be told that it’s one of the most famous horror novels of all time. Thus I’m going to put together a running series of Horror Books That Are Good And Which You May Not Have Heard Of, updated periodically, for anyone who’s interested.
Attila Veres, The Black Maybe
The Hungarian writter Attila Veres has been publishing in his native tongue for some time, but it was only in 2022 that speakers of non-Finno-Ugric tongues received their first exposure to him with the publication of the short story collection The Black Maybe More recently, one of his stories was collected in McSweeney’s 71, a first-time divergence into the horrore genre for the prestigious literary journal (edited, incidentally, by Brian Evenson, whom you’ll find below). Veres’s work can loosely be described as “Lovecraftian” or “cosmic” horror, but this is to do it an injustice. You won’t find rehashed variations of Cthulhu in his stories, but you will find brillaintly-written works set in an oppressive and terrifying universe. You could call it “deeply weird” and be closer to the mark. It comes highly recommended.
Nathan Ballingrud, North American Lake Monsters and Wounds
Ballingrud is, hands down, one of the best doing it right now. He has three books out to date — two anthologies and a novel, The Strange. The latter is very good, although sort of more dark-science-fiction-fantasy than strictly horror, which is not a criticism. The stories in North American Lake Monsters tend to be emotional gut punches, allusive and haunting. Some of those in Wounds are interconnected and tend a bit more towards the dark fantasy side of things, allowing Ballingrud’s skill at worldbuilding to shine through.
Michael McDowell, The Elementals and Blackwater
You are probably familiar with McDowell’s work if not his name: he was the screenwriter for Beetlejuice, as well as its unproduced sequel. He very tragically passed away at just 49 from complications due to AIDS, but the ouevre he left us with constitutes some of the best Southern Gothic writing of the later 20th century. The Elementals is a tight, mysterious little haunted house novel about a cursed family and a home overtaken by sand dunes; the main character is essentially a prelease version of Beetlejuice’s Lydia Deetz. Blackwater is actually six novels, now published in omnibus format, and less overtly horrific than the former. I once heard it described as “Faulkner with river monsters,” and that’s essentially it. It’s Faulkner with river monsters. Both The Elementals and Blackwater stand out for their subtlety, above else; both ask you to put work into deciphering them, into figuring out (for example) the precise nature of the curse that drives the Savage family to impale the corpses of their dead at each funeral.
T. E. D. Klein, everything by T. E. D. Klein
Klein is a vaguely cursed writer. Like Thomas Ligotti, whom you should also read, he produced some absolutely standout horror writing before being struck with crippling writer’s block and has published almost nothing in the last 25 years. If you read nothing else by him, read the novella or short story or whatever “The Events at Poroth Farm,” which (very loosely) is a sort of updated take on Lovecraft’s “The Colour out of Space.” He later expanded it into the novel The Ceremonies, which is very good but does lose something in the transition to the longer format.
His best work besides “Poroth” consists of four short stories, which are collected in the book Dark Gods. It’s long out of print but can be found through other means. Klein’s uncollected work, which is mostly good, was recently published in Providence After Dark and Other Writings.
Arthur Machen, The White People and Other Stories
Putting Arthur Machen on this list does feel a bit like belying the stated premise of sticking to works you might not have heard of, but he’s surprisingly little known outside of the realm of deep horror afficianados. A proper triumvirate of the best horror writers of the early 20th century would, in my book, consist of Lovecraft, M. R. James, and Machen. Some of his stories, which are preoccupied with ancient cults and dark secrets beneath the British landscape, seem like clear precursors to the folk horror subgenre; I’ve written a bit about them here.
Brian Evenson, A Collapse of Horses, Song for the Unravelling of the World, everything else
Evenson is a mysterious character. He maintains no real internet presence, and one of the few salient facts about him that I can discover is that he resigned from Brigham Young University and then left the Mormon church entirely over a controversy about his first novel, Altmann’s Tongue. He’s prodigious, though it’s been a couple of years since his last short story collection, and his stories defy easy generic convention. Many of them — like “The Blood Drip” are certainly horror. Others are just sort of indefinably odd, or blur the lines between horror and other genres (wester, science fiction, and so on). Like Robert Aickman, about whom I’ve written several times, his stories are sort of puzzle boxes for the reader: they hint at great movements just beyond the page, explanations that are ready to hand if you’re just clever enough to piece them together.