So you’re a die-hard lit fic reader, queuing dutifully for the latest from your favourite literary darlings and tuning in to Booker Prize read-alongs each year? But this year you feel a different calling… something’s shifted this October and a new craving has made its way to your gut. We felt it too. The darker nights have brought out a hidden desire for something wicked to land on our bookshelves this year…

We usually celebrate Halloween by delving into the world of genre fiction, but this year we want to bring you something a little different. We’re highlighting books that disturb not only your mind, but your bookshelves too. These are books that straddle the boundaries of genre, unnerve your sense of reality, and leave you wondering if you’ll ever be the same when the story’s over. Here are our selections for some of the most unhinged reads from incredible literary writers.

Jackdaw

Have you ever found yourself stuck in a whirlpool of obsession over an artist? Maybe you’ve spent a few sleepless nights hungrily devouring every word of your favourite band’s wikepedia, or printing out photo after photo to stick on your walls?

Tade Thompson’s darkly humorous novella Jackdaw tells the story of a psychiatrist caught in that obsessive whirlpool over the artist Francis Bacon (as if Bacon’s art wasn’t scary enough!). As he becomes consumed with the need to understand Bacon, and to create his own art, his grip on reality becomes increasingly tenuous, and he is haunted by disturbing figures. This short, bold piece of fiction explores how the passion needed to create art can also destroy the artist. This is one of those books that will leave you wondering, in the eloquent words of Goodreads reviewer Daisy, “what the flip”.

More Bugs

A hot mum, a Pennsylvania suburb, and UFO-obsessed adolescents — Em Reed gives you all the components we crave in a subversive literary horror. More Bugs centres on Amy, who finds herself dumped, broke and stranded at her mother’s house. Hanging out with her ex comes with getting to know his new girlfriend, someone who looks suspiciously like Amy’s younger, straighter doppelganger.

Strapped for cash and desperate to be out of her mother’s home, she ends up babysitting the UFO-obsessed kids of the hot working mom down the street. Over a dull, torrid summer in the Pennsylvania suburbs, strange lights linger on the horizon, and subterranean connections reach out their tendrils in the dark, signalling another, otherworldly possibility.

Supplication

An unnamed narrator comes to in a basement, tied to a chair, a man looming over her. Someone has a knife. She emerges from her captivity into a mysterious and nightmarish city, searching for meaning in her new reality. As figures emerge from the night, some offering sanctuary, and others judgement, she moves through a fever-dream narrative of alienation, fear, and the quest for respite. Strap in for Nour Abi-Nakhoul’s powerful debut novel, a hallucinatory literary horror set deep in the consciousness of a woman exploring a changed and frightening world.

Deliver Me

If the cover alone doesn’t make your toes curl, then the body horror of Elle Nash’s Deliver Me undoubtedly will. From the author of Nudes and Animals Eat Each Other, comes another unmissable literary thriller exploring motherhood, emotional manipulation and mental illness, inspired by a true crime.

Dee-Dee works at a meatpacking facility, where she and her coworkers kill and butcher 40,000 chickens in a single shift. The work is repetitive and brutal, with each stab and cut a punishment to her hands and joints, but Dee-Dee’s more concerned with what is happening inside her body. After a series of devastating miscarriages, Dee-Dee has found herself pregnant, and she is determined to carry this child to term. But will an unexpected arrival threaten it all?

Great Fear on the Mountain

Great Fear on the Mountain is a haunting, allegorical Swiss masterpiece centred around a posse of villagers as they brave dark elements to ascend a mountain, thicketed with lore. Feed is running low in a rural village in Switzerland. The town council meets to decide whether or not to ascend a chimerical mountain in order to access the open pastures that have enough grass to ‘feed seventy animals all summer long.’  The elders of the town protest, warning of the dangers and the dreadful lore that enfolds the mountain passageways like thick fog.

They’ve seen it all before, reckoning with the loss of animals and men who have tried to reach the pastures nearly twenty years ago. The younger men don’t listen, making plans to set off on their journey despite all warnings. As the terror of life on the mountain builds, Ramuz’s writing captures the follies of human pride, fear and intergenerational tensions.

Edendale

Jacqueline Stolos has injected her debut Edendale with all the essential ingredients of a top-tier eco-horror. Foreboding is in the air as northeast LA’s wild fires rage in the rapidly narrowing distance, and interpersonal tensions rise to a boiling point for four millennial housemates stranded in a bungalow.

Ropey closes his checking account and transfers his net worth to his sock drawer. Megan sharpens pencils and chops produce to obsession. Lyle tightens his grip on his girlfriend Egypt, whose growing dependence makes her question everything, especially Lyle. And Captain America, the cat of the house, finds his orange coat giving way to a nest of bleeding sores. As the fires burn ever closer, will the four friends wake up to their false paradise?

Jackal

By now, you’ve hopefully already heard of Jackal by Erin E. Adams. This horror has already been lauded in numerous award nominations and added to countless ‘best of’ book lists from Goodreads to Cosmo. In Jackal, Adams delivers a chilling hometown thriller that also explores the mistreatment and murder of Black women and girls.

As a Black woman, Liz doesn’t exactly have fond memories of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a predominantly white town. But her best friend is getting married, so she braces herself for a weekend of awkward, passive-aggressive reunions. But on the night of the wedding, somewhere between dancing and dessert, the newlyweds’ daughter, Caroline, disappears. As a frantic search begins, with the police combing the trees for Caroline, Liz is the only one who notices a pattern: A summer night. A missing girl. A party in the woods. She’s seen this before. With the evil in the forest creeping closer, Liz knows what she must do: find Caroline, or be entirely consumed by the darkness

Panics

Barbara Molinard is an author as bizarre and haunting as her singular short story collection Panics. A protégé of Marguerite Duras, she wrote feverishly but destroyed nearly every page she wrote and kept herself shielded from public acknowledgement. This new edition of her collection, translated from French by Emma Ramadan and published by Influx Press, brings her work into the light.

Panics includes thirteen stories that all explore mental illness, and the warped contradictions of the twentieth-century female experience. A woman becomes transfixed by a boa constrictor at her local zoo, mysterious surgeons dismember their patient, and the author narrates to Duras how she was stopped from sleeping in a cemetery vault, only to be haunted by the pain of sleeping on its stone floor. This is a perfectly surreal and nightmarish collection from a tormented writer who has so far been shrouded in mystery.