Everybody loves a haunted house story: The Haunting of Hill House, The Turn of the Screw, House of Leaves. But the haunted house story is only one example of a much vaster, darker subgenre. Ghosts, murderers, evil mushrooms—these malevolent entities don’t just limit themselves to houses. They can haunt villages, old hotels, even entire landscapes.
In my novel Until Death, the evil force lurks within the roots of a vineyard in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The book is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek horror novel about wedding planning—but it’s also about the very real horror of caring for a parent with dementia.
When writing the novel, I knew I wanted the horror element to heighten and underscore the ugliness of both wedding planning and caretaking. The way planning and caretaking take over your life. The sense that everything you do—the decisions you make, the consequences real or imagined, the disapproval of the people who mean most to you—is burgeoning, looming, caging you in. The way the days speed up or else slow to an excruciating crawl. The sick feeling of dread, of not knowing how you found yourself here. Of seeing no way out.
I draw a distinction between a book where the setting is the evil force, versus a book where the evil force is an entity within the setting. For example, I would argue that Stephen King’s IT, despite the tagline of this very essay (which is actually not from the book, but from Welcome to Derry), is the latter. After all, Derry would be fine if not for the presence of IT. The townspeople might still be petty and cruel, but we can assume they wouldn’t be murdering each other under bridges.
No, a true horror-rich setting comes when it’s the bridges themselves doing the murdering.
From houses to estates to entire cities, here are six horror novels where the place is the problem.
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Chuck Wendig, The Staircase in the Woods
Four friends, who were close as teenagers but are now nearly estranged from one another, gather to search for a fifth friend who disappeared when they were young. The catch is that the fifth friend disappeared at the top of a mysterious staircase the teens found in the woods…and then the staircase vanished. Now the staircase back, and it’s ready to swallow them whole like it swallowed him.
Wendig’s take on the haunted house novel is not only spooky, it’s gripping and heartbreaking. It weaves together themes of friendship, midcentury America, and, oddly enough, video game design. And the house itself? It’s evil as hell.
Kate Maruyama, Family Solstice (Bleak Houses)
Part of the collection Bleak Houses, this short novel is about twelve-year-old Shea, whose family battles a malevolent force in their basement year after year, keeping it at bay and shoring up their own security. This year, it will finally be Shea’s turn to take up the mantle, fight the thing in the basement, and prove herself to her family.
The problem is, she hasn’t been told what’s actually in the basement.
The darkness at the root of the Family Solstice house is thematically rich, bound up with questions of inheritance, patriarchy, and colonialism. Tense, eerie, and full of feeling, Family Solstice also features a very unexpected, very satisfying ending.
Helen Phillips, The Beautiful Bureaucrat
Does an office building count as a house? This quiet novel about the horrors of capitalism kicks off with, “The person who interviewed her had no face,” and only gets weirder from there. Our protagonist Josephine is, believe it or not, lucky to have landed this creepy job, where she spends entire days entering strange and mysterious strings of numbers into a database, ensconced in a mysterious, nameless building where the keyboards clack eerily and the numbers echo in her head and the walls, slowly, slowly, slowly, begin to seem alive.
I read this novel in one sitting. It’s a perfect horror novel about being a working stiff: nightmarish, dreamlike, but peppered with concrete moments. It’s also totally grounded in the sweetest, truest sense of what it feels like to be human.
Jenny Kiefer, This Wretched Valley
All right, forget buildings. In Jenny Kiefer’s This Wretched Valley, four rock climbers hike to a strange rock face in the Kentucky wilderness—one that looks to be totally untouched, even though that should be impossible. The rock face is perfect, seemingly too perfect, for their shared goals of scientific research and rock climbing fame.
Guess what? It is, in fact, too perfect.
This is a survival novel (or a…failure-to-survival novel?) that takes nature’s truest threats—the possibilities of fatal injury, of starvation, of getting lost, of no one coming to save you—and jacks them up to eleven. Kiefer’s wilderness is not just vast and uncaring, it’s hungry. And it really doesn’t like you.
Premee Mohamed, The Butcher of the Forest
A more fantastical approach to what I might call the “haunted wilderness” subgenre, The Butcher of the Forest follows a middle-aged woman, Veris, as she plunges into the otherworldly woods that border her homeland. No one who has entered the forest has ever emerged…except for Veris herself, who rescued a lost child from it many years ago. Now, the Tyrant who rules these lands has lost his children to the forest. And if Veris does not rescue them, he will make sure that she loses everything else.
Some horror novels are nothing but gore and dread all the way through. Others, though, tilt more toward optimism, even if they never quite get there. Indeed, the not-quite-getting-there often makes them more horrific than if they never approached optimism at all. The Butcher of the Forest is one of these. It is also finely written, and very anxiety-inducing.
Giorgio de Maria, The Twenty Days of Turin
This 1977 Italian novel, detailing a “phenomenon of collective psychosis” in the gothic city of Turin, is packed to the gills with ambitious, weird, bizarre imagery that chills the bones. A mysterious Library that eerily foreshadows social media; mass insomnia; people killed by someone picking them up by the ankles and smashing them into trees; anonymous letters from a man whose stairwell is filling with human excrement and trash; a man with a dried-up lake inside of him, and he can see bas-reliefs on the bottom, and they fills him with terror and dread.
De Maria’s Turin is the truest kind of horror setting there is, both haunted and doing the haunting. And the mass psychosis of the citizenry underscores a fact that we—thanks, Internet—now know only too well. De Maria knew it too. “What is shared can never be unshared.” In fact, it can haunt you.
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