I should have been concerned about bull moose and bears. It was a moonless night in late September. I listened to it while taking my dog for a nighttime walk in the park near my home in Wyoming. It’s a horrific, deeply unpleasant story, made even more chilling by the steady cadence of Sharma’s voice. “Zombie,” which Oates later expanded into a novella, is told from the perspective of a college-aged, Dahmer-esque psychopath who performs lobotomies on kidnapped young men in an attempt to create a docile sexual slave. So, on the recommendation of a friend, I decided to go down a more literary route and listen to Akil Sharma read Joyce Carol Oates’ 1994 short story “Zombie” on the New Yorker Fiction Podcast. The barrage of ads for Dahmer did, however, pique my interest in fictional representations of the Milwaukee Monster, who committed the murder and dismemberment of seventeen men and boys between 19. The center of the cannibalism/sexual violence/obnoxious theater kid pep Venn diagram is not a place I want to dwell. But I’m not going to watch Ryan Murphy’s cannibal show. Serial killers, their origin stories, and the mark they’ve left on this country’s collective psyche, are interesting let’s not pretend otherwise. I very much enjoyed Mindhunter and The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal (both the show and the extremely stupid movie). It’s not that I don’t understand the public fascination with serial killers and America’s storied serial killer heyday. I’m sure it’s entertaining, but I’m not going to watch it. I’m not going to watch the Jeffrey Dahmer show. No doubt the novel is a triumphant work of art, and indeed a cool feminist thriller, but it is one that haunts my dreams. In fact, if you haven’t read it, I don’t want to say anything else about it, except that you should only attempt if you have a stronger stomach than I. I tease her about it all the time, but I still fell for it when she recommended that I read Susanna Moore’s “cool feminist thriller” In the Cut, which turned out to be a terrifying, upsetting, gut-punch of a book with a devastating ending that I will not give away. When we were in college, my best friend convinced me to go see a movie because it was a “cool indie comedy” and it turned out to be Hard Candy, in which a pedophile and a teenager meet and one of them tortures and humiliates the other in a way that is kind of brilliant in retrospect but also deeply awful and disturbing to watch. Look, life is hard enough-why would I go out of my way to have more negative feelings? I know some people find it cathartic, but I just find it unpleasant. Here are the books that actually scared the Lit Hub staff, this year and in years past-pick them up if you dare, but leave some space in your freezer just in case. The following books, on the other hand, just might. Sure, you could go read Frankenstein this All Hallows’ Eve, and while it’s still great, it probably won’t make you jump. Yep, it’s spooky season, and the perfect time of year to read something scary-but as you know, horror can come from some unexpected places. Goblins, ghouls, dead plants, pumpkin spice lattes, politicians in your inbox.
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