7 spooky crime novels ‹ CrimeReads

I've been addicted to crime novels for years, but my very first love was horror. Luckily for me and many other grateful readers, there are plenty of fabulously scary authors like Hjortsberg, Gruber, Connelly, Beukes, and of course Mr. King who blend both genres seamlessly, infusing their murder and mayhem with the supernatural. But as much as I enjoy their creepy and often demonic thrills, there's a special place in my twisted heart for crime novels where the horror is more ambiguous and a more subtle sense of the uncanny is woven into the story of a crime.

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While my latest novel, The therapist's daughteris primarily concerned with the tangible mess of human relationships and concrete physical threats, but also deals with occult themes and more obscure fears, and while I was writing the book I found myself returning to a certain kind of shadow fiction.

Many of my favorite books are elusive, blurring genre lines and elusive undercurrents. By relying on the power of suggestion over definitive solutions, some of the novels below deliberately tread the disorienting territory Freud described in his famous 1919 essay “The Uncanny.” There's something fundamentally wrong with their settings and characters. The familiar becomes strange, and repressed emotions seep through like pesky—or petrifying—ghosts that can't be contained.

Other books on this list tie psychological and paranormal elements more directly to crime, playing with notions of possession, curses, and ghosts. But whether they hint at an underlying darkness or induce a state of chilling existential dread, each of these novels is imbued with an eerie atmosphere that threatens to unsettle your perceptions and infect your dreams. I challenge you to read them without feeling haunted…

Ian Reid, I'm thinking of breaking up

With its ominous digressions, compulsive refrains, and ever-present claustrophobia, Reid's road-trip psychological thriller is undeniably dazzling. I don't want to give too much away, so I'll just say that the narrator and reader are constantly caught flat-footed, and that Jake's girlfriend's visit to his parents' house is packed with moments so eerie that even Freud's mind would be impressed. These include missing and misplaced objects, duplicate images and oddly familiar photographs, and a basement full of hidden secrets – and once Jake and his girlfriend start traveling again, things get stranger and stranger.

Elizabeth Brundage, All things cease to appear

The magic of Brundage's beautiful, sad novel is quiet but captivating. It begins with seemingly disembodied voices from a haunted house, reflecting on past lives and mysteries to come. As the novel progresses, as the truth behind a crime emerges, the living characters sometimes seem aware of a presence beyond themselves, and alongside their stories, the reader learns of the house's suffering from the perspective of the dead. Yet despite the elegant writing style and construction, we must never forget the brutal axe murder that underlies the narrative. All Things Cease to Appear is indeed a very dark lullaby.

J.Robert Lennon, Broken River

With Broken Riverwe have another house in the middle of nowhere, more brutality and senseless death, and something eerily “different” happening. But in Lennon's psychological thriller, the eeriness surrounding a horrific crime and its equally tense aftermath is created through an unusual and incredibly effective structural device.

From the beginning, when a double murder is uncovered (which seems all the more gruesome because it is presented largely off-screen through sounds and suggestions), the reader is accompanied by the Observer, an invisible, ghostly, inexplicable presence.

Years after the murders, as newcomers Eleanor and her twelve-year-old daughter Irena become dangerously obsessed with the unsolved crime, the Observer sometimes seems to represent their morbid curiosity. And as the novel's ominous plot builds, the Observer may not just reflect the characters' fascination; this observing presence raises uncomfortable questions about complicity that may also weigh on the reader and the author. But Broken River offers no easy answers, and perhaps that, as well as the gripping plot, is what gives this book its unsettling power.

Sarah Waters, affinity

It was difficult to decide which wonderful novel by Waters I should choose. The Little Strangerwhich starts out as a traditional haunted house story and gradually evolves into something spookily different, was tempting, but I'm choosing Affinity because, despite all the obvious gothic cliches, it's about crime and conspiracy right from the start.

Margaret Prior is a voluntary visitor at Millbank Prison when she meets disgraced spiritualist Selena Dawes, convicted for her role in an unexplained death during a séance. With her trademark twists and revelations, Waters deftly tells the noir-like story of the affinity between these two women, but what remains is the novel's darkness. Fear snakes through love and longing, as eerie as the crawling fingers of the waxen hand of Selena's spirit guide.

Dan Chaon, malice

In addition to including a disturbingly dark alternate storyline, maliceis, like my latest novel, about a therapist who is, to say the least, misguided.

malicePsychologist Dustin Tillman has learned to live an exceptionally passive life after a childhood marked by the murders of his parents, aunt and uncle. But everything changes when he hears that his adopted brother, convicted of the crimes during the Satanic Panic of the '80s, is about to be released. Unable to deal with the past, Dustin becomes drawn into a patient's serial killer theories about a recent series of drownings. Soon, the stories he's always told himself start to spiral out of control.

Chaon weaves truth, memory, and self-deception like an evil wizard, skilfully confusing his readers. At times the text collapses along with its characters, and no matter which version of Dustin's story you believe, this novel will get under your skin.

And while I'm at it, I'd also like to praise Chaon's brilliant and often spooky short stories, particularly “The Farm. The Gold. The Lily-White Hands,” in which characters are haunted in imaginative and chilling ways by the ghosts they might have become.

Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

Back when I was still at university, I had to justify my dissertation on du Maurier; in the 1990s, her work was not yet considered part of the literary canon. But over the years Rebecca has been recognized as the absolute classic that it clearly is, and given its harrowing psychological revelations and mounting threat, how could I not include it here?

Although it is not a conventional ghost story, Rebecca is a novel about haunting. From its famous opening dream to its vivid and often shrine-like rooms, the past constantly threatens to engulf the present, and secrets and emotions cannot be suppressed. With each re-read Rebecca blows me away and like its nameless and definitely unsettled narrator, I will never stop returning to Manderley.

Paul Tremblay, A head full of ghosts

Although it is the most obviously scary book on this list, the horror in Tremblay's novel is both psychological and supernatural. Pace and structure like the best thrillers, A head full of ghosts explores the mystery behind the suspected demonic possession of fourteen-year-old Marjorie Barrett and the criminally unethical reality television show that documents her descent into darkness.

Tremblay combines genuinely frightening scenes and images – Marjorie’s physical contortions and transformations, the trauma of her exorcism, and her stories of “growing things” – with questions about the slippery nature of truth, our (in)human condition, and the monsters we fear or need (concerns he also brilliantly explores in his terrifying latest novel, horror film). As a result, Tremblay's tale of possession takes possession of his readers and fills our heads with ghosts.

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