We are in the midst of spooky season! But why let the lurking of monsters or the creeping of ghosts keep you up at night, when the human mind is a far more terrifying place than any haunted house. If you thought the shadowy corner of your bedroom at night was scary, try the obsidian abyss of your own paranoia. As Emily Dickinson so beautifully writes in one of my favorite poems:
“One need not be a chamber— to be haunted
One need not be a house—
The Brain— has corridors surpassing
Material Place—”
Psychological Horror is a haunting of the mind. What makes this sub-genre of horror so effective in terror is its centering of unreliable narration, mental illness, descents into madness, paranoia, and characters haunted by guilt, loss, trauma, and past crimes as main themes. If Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic short story The Tell Tale Heart comes to mind, you’re heading in the right direction. Psychological horror tends to beg questions like: “Are my eyes deceiving me?”, “Am I imagining things?”, “Are the voices I’m hearing coming from the attic or inside my own head?”, “Am I being watched?”, “Who else knows?” Whether the story involves the supernatural or the real world, the mind is the true victim in psychological horror. If you're interested in spending your October with some psychological horror book recommendations, your spooky librarian has you covered.
5 Psychological Horror Book Recs
“I really have discovered something at last. Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out. The front pattern does move - and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it! Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard. And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern - it strangles so..."
After giving birth to her baby, a young woman is locked away in a room by her husband (a doctor) who believes she is suffering from "temporary nervous depression" (postpartum depression). The room is depressing and our unnamed narrator is lonely, with nothing but a sickly yellow wallpaper to entertain herself with. She's isolated for so long that she starts to see images in this wallpaper come to life in the moonlight, particularly an image of a woman she believes is trapped behind the dizzying patterns.
This story is not just about a descent into madness, but also a story of women's oppressive conditions and lack of agency in the patriarchal 19th century. Oh! And did I mention it's a quick sixty-two pages?
“The stinkhorn was woven into man’s dreams, ever since there were men on these hillsides. It hovered, dim and white and putrid, in their nightmares. It was a symbol of their manhood. Its very transience was essential to the magic, that it came and went so quickly, as a witch of the woods and would flicker faintly and then vanish among the dark shadows.”
In this story, an Englishman is haunted by his own impotence after a date night romance goes terribly wrong. While staying in a cottage in the woods to get away from his troubles, he feels mocked by a wild mushroom called the stinkhorn— “...the forest’s unashamed caricature of the human phallus…” Isolated in the deep wilderness of the Welsh countryside along with his trustful dog Phoebe, Andrew gathers mushroom bulbs, collects animal corpses for their maggots (the spores of the stinkhorn mushroom are dispersed by flies), and turns his cabin into a cold, damp habitat in order to grow more stinkhorns, which have become the objects of his worship.
Originally published in the 80’s, this book is filled with a rich atmosphere and lots of lush, detailed descriptions of nature in autumnal Wales. This would be the perfect October read as there are lots of references to death, rot, and decay juxtaposed with a damp cottage, the dark woods, fallen leaves, and misty rainfall. Slow paced with plenty of creeping paranoia, The Woodwitch is perfect for readers who love psychological horror that features themes of obsession, isolation, and the perils of male fragility.
“Monsters are real. Ghosts are too. They live inside of us, and sometimes, they win.”
I've recommended Stephen King's The Shining in a previous blog post, but it deserves a second mention because it is an excellent example of psychological horror. If you're completely new to the story (and have also somehow never seen the Stanley Kubrick film adaptation), it follows Jack Torrence, an aspiring writer who is offered the opportunity to move his wife and son into the Overlook Hotel and take up responsibility as caretaker during the winter off-season. Jack, who has been battling inner-demons for a long time, feels this is his chance for a fresh start, a hope for redemption, and perhaps finally an opportunity to make progress on a play he's been working on. But something sinister dwells within the perimeters of the ancient hotel and begins seeping into his psyche, unlocking the cage to the inner-monsters Jack has tried to keep suppressed.
If you're new to psychological horror (or Stephen King), this book is an excellent place to start because it holds all the right ingredients---isolation, haunted characters, anxiety, etc. And readers will be witness to the dark, paranoid thoughts of Jack as he descends into madness. King was inspired by Shirley Jackson's equally psychological Haunting of Hill House when he crafted this masterpiece and, like Jackson's story, is a perfect example of a story centering haunted spaces preying on haunted people.
“Did evil have wants and needs? Surely not, surely that would make it too human. No longer a tug from the depths of the abyss, but something sentient that could surface in anyone. In her.”
This story follows the widowed and pregnant Elsie Bainbridge who has moved into her late husband’s dilapidated estate in the year 1865. Accompanied by her husband’s cousin Sarah, Elsie feels she could use some friendship seeing as the servants are hostile and the nearby villagers are full of superstitions. Who could blame them when it is discovered that there has been something akin to a dark curse over the house and the Bainbridge family for 200 years. Perhaps it might have something to do with a very peculiar secret locked up in the attic.
The pacing for this story creeps like a velvety shadow and it is glorious! Readers will love how the dark mystery unfolds through the alternating timelines of two different centuries. I am also confident in saying I thought the ending was (*chefs kiss*) perfection. But the height of my adoration for this book came from the author’s clever use of the “companions”, making this one of the most unique ghost stories I’d ever read. (Google “dutch silent companions 17th century” and tell me you aren’t creeped out)!
If you should pick this one up, I would advise to read this on days when it seems the rain will never let up. Read this in Autumn when the chill returns and you’re comforted by your thick blankets and hot tea. Read this in Winter, in the dark, by candlelight, with a glass of mulled wine. Whenever you choose to read it, let this haunting tale of spilled blood and madness engulf you.
The Last House on Needless Street
“How many times can someone bend before they break forever? You have to take care, dealing with broken things; sometimes they give way, and break others in their turn.”
If you've never read any books by author Catriona Ward, this book is the perfect place to start. It leans more psychological thriller than horror, but many of the themes are still front and center! Nothing is what it seems in this story and it's best to jump in blind. What I will say without spoiling much, is that it is told from multiple perspectives and all of the narrators are unreliable. Readers are introduced to a lonely man, a woman in search of her long lost sister, and a very endearing, religious cat. I freaking loved the strangeness of this story and I loved even more how it all came together by the final pages.
Haunting Honorable Mentions
Need more psychological horror to start your fall? Here are some honorable mentions in both fiction and film:
PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR IN FICTION
PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR IN FILM
—Christina James is a Readers' Services Assistant at Lawrence Public Library.
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