What makes a spooky novella so satisfying? You might as well ask why a raven is like a writing desk. (The answer, of course, is that all three things remind me of my own mortality.)
All riddles aside, the novella is, at best, a slippery beast. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association defines it as a story that is anywhere from 70 pages to 160 pages long, but such cut-offs are doomed to be arbitrary—not just page layout and font size, but style and scope can contribute to the feeling. A long story like Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild may read like a novella because of the density of its ideas, despite being only thirty-ish pages; whereas a short novel like Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor may feel novella-esque because of its allegorical style and singular focus. Neither fish nor fowl nor many-tentacled monster, you know it when you see it.
Perhaps that’s why the novella form is so perfect for horror, with its combination of moral seriousness, sensory vertigo, and difficult-to-sustain tension. Horror is a genre of parables, wherein ethical and existential problems are raised and resolved with a violence proportionate to their invasiveness into “normal” life. By setting modest parameters and eschewing subplots, a novella can play out a single high-stakes problem from start to finish. And with the page count so low, you’re almost guaranteed to stay up into the dark and dreadful night to finish it. Devour these quickly, before they devour you.
(Word counts are based on the author’s copies.)
My Death, Lisa Tuttle (93 pages)
Having written the introduction for this one, I’m biased. That said, this novella about a blocked writer who embarks on the biography of a forgotten modernist is a modern-day classic of weird fiction, an uncanny feminist fable, and a folk horror gem all wrapped up in one gorgeous, eerie little package. Based partially on the life of Laura Riding and other non-conforming modernist women, especially those relegated to the role of “muse,” it’s Possession by way of M. R. James, an uncanny story about women’s desire as an earth-shattering force from which there’s no escape.
Flowers for the Sea, Zin E. Rocklyn (104 pages)
One of a number of novellas from reliably interesting Tordotcom Publishing, Flowers for the Sea is a trippy, claustrophobic, dystopian ride fueled by pure rage. Iraxi is the sole surviving daughter of a racially-motivated attack on her family, coastal dwellers reputed to be able to communicate with the sea and its monsters. Imprisoned below-decks on a floating ark, pregnant with a child who may or may not be human, Iraxi awaits a dark and violent reckoning. Rocklyn’s hallucinatory prose makes everything visceral and horrific, including a description of childbirth unlike any other.
When Darkness Loves Us: Two Chilling Tales, Elizabeth Engstrom (64 pages)
Have you ever read something that makes you audibly gasp on the very first page—and every few pages after that, right until the end? I don’t think my jaw has ever hit the floor so many times. I hesitate to spoil a single moment of this horror classic revived by Valancourt Books as part of their Paperbacks from Hell series, so I will just say that you will have nightmares of caves for a long time to come. Both frightening and repellent, it will appeal to fans of The Descent, Barbarian, and any other descent from normalcy into an archetypal underworld.
Ghost Wall, Sarah Moss (130 pages)
My favorite of Sarah Moss’s body of work, this slender, gorgeously-written folk horror novella grapples with the patriarchal (and worse) urges behind survivalism, nostalgia, and a fanatical obsession with England’s past. Teenage Silvie and her tyrannical father, a self-taught expert on Iron Age life, are guiding a group of anthropology students in their attempts to live like the ancient Britons in the English countryside. With the help of the students, Silvie is just beginning to imagine a life away from her father—when she starts to suspect the reenactment has a sinister side. A brief, devastating read that says more about gender in the modern era than in the Iron Age.
The Driver’s Seat, Muriel Spark (88 pages)
This is what happens when Dame Muriel Spark has just lived through the Swinging Sixties and sits down to write a book about it. Stunningly weird, pointy and funny and mean, it harnesses Spark’s trademark nasty wit and impeccable prose to a kind of screwball, technicolor, Europop sensibility, starting with protagonist Lise’s new dress: “It is patterned with green and purple squares on a white background, with blue spots within the green squares, cyclamen spots within the purple.” If that isn’t enough to give you nightmares already, we soon find out what fate the unpleasant Lise is rushing toward—and why it’s so important that the dress’s new, synthetic fabric is guaranteed not to stain.
The Grownup, Gillian Flynn (64 pages)
This slim little volume puzzled many as a follow up to Gone Girl. In fact, it is a perfect example of the spooky novella—Halloween-ready, yet also a perfect stocking stuffer for lovers of darkly humorous fiction, canny narrators, uncanny events, and Flynn’s perfect pitch. A con artist currently working the fake-psychic beat investigates a haunted house and takes an interest in the plight of the teenage boy who lives there. Is there a Gone Girl twist? That would be telling. Let’s just say it’s a wicked snack of a story.
Nothing But Blackened Teeth, Cassandra Khaw (128 pages)
If you’re in the mood for a Japanese destination wedding plagued by ghosts and murder and toxic friend drama, look no further. A dysfunctional friend-group arrives at a haunted Heian-era mansion where a jilted bride and her handmaidens were buried alive. The baroque, gothy prose is prickly and alive and delightfully extra, giving this haunted-house story a hallucinatory edge, the mansion itself is in many ways more likable than the characters: “green and damp and dark and hungry, hollow as a stomach that’d forgotten what it was like to eat.”
Crossroads, Laurel Hightower (110 pages)
“The first time Chris buried a part of herself by her son’s roadside cross, it was an accident.” So begins this devastating indie-horror gem about a mother’s grief. No less powerful for its classic “monkey’s paw” plot line, Crossroads has a spare, straightforward emotional brutality to it, like a pared-down Pet Sematary. If it’s simpler than King’s masterpiece, it’’s every bit as chilling.
The Vet’s Daughter, Barbara Comyns (133 pages)
If this creepy little novella by early-twentieth-century British oddball Barbara Comyns isn’t true horror, it’ll give you nightmares all the same. Alice Rowlands lives in a squalid London flat with her monstrous, terrifying father, a supposedly accomplished veterinarian who seems more inclined to torture and kill animals than to help them: “Before the fire-place was a rug made from a skinned Great Dane dog, and on the carved mantelpiece there was a monkey’s skull with a double set of teeth, which seemed to chatter when you looked at them.” As Alice struggles to escape her suffocating, abattoir-like home life, she discovers a strange power that may either give her a way out, or seal her fate.
Fever Dream, Samanta Schweblin (183 pages)
In this twisting, Lynchian Moebius strip of a story, a woman lies delirious in a hospital struggling to answer the questions of an unearthly little boy about what went wrong. An eerie merging of psychological and environmental horror, it is set in an infected landscape, but what feels like an ancient evil may actually be a modern industrial one. The singsong dialogue with the mysterious son of a friend creates an eerie-cozy vibe reminiscent of Margaret Wise Brown’s cadences, but this story of motherhood in a toxic world is definitely not for children—or for the faint of heart.
Goddess of Filth, V. Castro (156 pages)
A fast, fierce, and unexpectedly cathartic coming of age tale, this San Antonio-set novella lives up to its The Craft comp. Five Chicana teens summon up something they don’t understand, and the resulting possession has catastrophic results. When the titular goddess shows up, the prose kindles and ignites.
Lucky Girl, How I Became A Horror Writer: A Krampus Story, M. Rickert (112 pages)
I love a spooky Christmas story in the M. R. James tradition. There’s just something about holiday horror that makes you feel cozier in comparison with the dead, wintry landscape outside the window. (And if you live somewhere green, you’ll be even more grateful for the imported chill.) This wintry, melancholic little tale about a friend group’s gift exchanges over the years manages to nest several different horror subgenres in one, like unwrapping each package to find the next one inside, somehow wrapping them up in a bow at the end.
Transmuted, Eve Harms (71 pages)
It should be no surprise that trans horror is making waves on the horror scene right now, given how often the genre deals with identity shifts and physical transformation. This Grand Guignol body-horror fable has a clever premise: a livestream gamer, forced to spend the money intended for her fan-funded transition surgery on a family emergency, agrees to undergo an experimental treatment that makes her beautiful beyond her wildest dreams… at first. With humor, sexiness, and gross-out gore, Transmuted picks away at misogynistic and transmisogynistic beauty standards, erupting into an Island of Dr. Moreau-style frenzy at the end. A surprisingly tender read, the happy ending is worth the price of admission.
The Taiga Syndrome, Cristina Rivera Garza (82 pages)
The Ex-Detective and a translator set out into a hostile, snowy landscape to track down a client’s ex-wife. The result is a beautiful, fascinating, primal-scene fairy tale laced with body horror and steeped in questions of translation and the deceptions of language. A tone poem, a mystery, and a dark fairy tale that shimmers and transforms whenever you think you’ve pinned it down, this is Rivera Garza doing what she does best—shifting the grounds of reality under our feet with her perfect, and perfectly enigmatic, prose.
Come Closer, Sara Gran (194 pages)
Now with a cool new cover for its 20th anniversary, Come Closer is a Halloween standby for a reason. This deadpan demon-possession tale (or is it?) is chilling, funny, and far ahead of the curve on women’s horror, asking the question of what exactly a woman has to let into her soul in order to start standing up for herself. I was honestly surprised to see it was one of the longer ones on this list—I inhaled this in an afternoon, and felt as if someone were standing behind me the whole time. Nobody does Sara Gran like Sara Gran.
BONUS: One or Several Deserts, Carter St. Hogan (206 pages)
Okay, I cheated: I included one story collection on this list, but only because its heady swirl of experimental prose and gorgeous fragments makes it read like one long, dark fever dream. From the award-winning nightmare of “Little Skin Bag” to the haunting last paragraph of “The Geodic Body” (“A grave, made of many graves, becomes a graveyard. A wanting, made of many wantings, becomes a transformation”), you won’t find anything else like St. Hogan’s emotionally slicing yet oddly hopeful trans horror. They’re a name to watch.
