Leah Rachel von Essen reviews genre-bending fiction for Booklist, and writes regularly as a senior contributor at Book Riot. Her blog While Reading and Walking has over 10,000 dedicated followers over several social media outlets, including Instagram. She writes passionately about books in translation, chronic illness and bias in healthcare, queer books, twisty SFF, and magical realism and folklore. She was one of a select few bookstagrammers named to NewCity’s Chicago Lit50 in 2022. She is an avid traveler, a passionate fan of women’s basketball and soccer, and a lifelong learner. Twitter: @reading_while
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Mitsuhiro Matsunaga is an investor relations manager at a large development firm that’s currently in the process of constructing a new high-rise building. After claims surface online of fires breaking out, illness spreading, and human bones unearthed at the site, he ventures there himself to find out whether there’s any truth to the rumors. During his search, he detects an eerie dryness, and the distinct smell of a person burned completely to ash, bones and all. Eventually, Mitsuhiro stumbles across a mysterious ritual space with a huge hole not on any blueprints—and inside it, a man in chains.
Before Ringu (1998) or The Ring (2002) hit theaters, Kōji Suzuki’s novel Ring, later translated by Glynne Walley and Robert B. Rohmer, was on shelves, terrifying the heck out of readers. Then there’s Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist, translated by Ebba Sergerberg, which is considered some of the best vampire fiction of all time. From Junji Ito’s terrifying ink-drawn manga to the dread-laden works of Samanta Schweblin and Mónica Ojeda, horror is being crafted at the highest level around the world. Some of the best horror in the world has come from outside of the United States. So why aren’t we reading more of it?
Let’s change that, shall we? These eight recommendations hail from Iceland, the Philippines, India, Switzerland, Nigeria, Japan, Argentina, and Italy. Take a (very creepy, very threatening) tour around the world with these eight horror reads, and encounter everything from real-life serial-killing violence and abuse to surreal, are-they-real-or-not apparitions to very not-real-life (thank goodness) paranormal happenings that will have you turning on every light in the house. Pour yourself a cup of warm tea, draw the curtains, and have a cozy pet or friend close for these eight reads.
I Remember You by Yrsa Sigurdardottir, translated by Philip Roughton
This book, translated from Icelandic, will send shivers right down your spine. A trio of friends go to a mostly abandoned fishing town with the hopes of renovating a house, and they soon discover that something (someone?) is not pleased they’re there. Meanwhile, a second plotline follows a doctor who looks into a woman’s death by suicide right around the same time that his son goes mysteriously missing. The two plotlines slowly come together in this frightening novel that has been giving readers nightmares.
Come Tomorrow and Other Tales of Bangalore Terror by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy
Satyamurthy’s book is part spooky love letter to the city of Bangalore, India, and part collection of ghost stories. He touches on an urban legend of a witch roaming, calling out to people in the voices of the people they love—you put a sign on the door that says “come tomorrow” to try and trick it on its way. Parasites infest and infect. A character discovers thin places in the city where the past and the present bleed together. The stories range from eldritch cosmic horror to weird, twisty tales.
The Black Spider by Jeremias Gotthelf, translated by Susan Bernofsky
When a guest at a christening notices a blackened post on an otherwise perfect farmhouse, the grandfather begins to tell a story of how a terrifying, horrific spider preyed on a town, and how real, seemingly sane people allowed it to do so, not just once, but twice. The dread and suspense of it all are eerie, and the story takes on the elements of a fable. This Swiss novella was written in 1842, and is an absolute classic tale of the supernatural that has also been said to predict the rise of the Nazis.
In the Miso Soup by Ryū Murakami, translated by Ralph McCarthy
Kenji has been hired to take an American tourist on a tour of the grimier side of Tokyo’s nightlife scene. It’s not always the best job, but it pays well, and it’s easy enough: take the guy around to a couple of S&M or cabaret bars and that’s that. Things seem to be going fine, but increasingly, something about Frank is rubbing Kenji the wrong way. And when the newest murder in a recent string of violence pops up, the thought pops into his head: what if Frank is responsible? This novel is a perfect example of Japanese suspense and horror defined by a slow, unspooling dread.
Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell
A new form of horror has been rolling out of Central and South America: a tantalizing mixture of magical realism and psychological and social horror. One of its icons is Argentine author Mariana Enríquez, and this 2017 collection is haunting and often grisly. A woman sees what she believes is a chained-up child in her neighbor’s property. A young woman is married to a man she dislikes, and in a strange hotel, she has a strange, haunting dream. Urban legends, real-life horrors, and surreal, unsettling twists dominate this fast, unputdownable read.
The Sleepless by Nuzo Onoh
Obelé, fleeing the aftermath of her brother’s death, haunted by a voice and her father’s violence, takes refuge in a seemingly haunted house and makes friends with the beings there that are called The Sleepless. As the Biafran War looms, a web of cruelty, abuse, and more permeates Obelé’s village, and her refuge, it turns out, is with the supernatural. But is she really safe with them? Real-world terrors mix with the paranormal to create an eerie story written by a Nigerian-born author who was the first African author to win the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Dwellers by Eliza Victoria
Two men, dwellers who can hop from one body to another, stealing the lives of others, jump into the bodies of two brothers, Jonah and Louis. But they quickly have a problem: there’s a corpse in the basement, and their new bodies come with quite a lot of baggage. This paranormal thriller won the Philippine National Book Award, and is just 160 pages of eerie, vivid speculative fiction where the fantasy is (surprise) much less appalling than what real-life humans seem to be capable of doing to each other.
The Twenty Days of Turin by Giorgio De Maria, translated by Ramon Glazov
The youths thought the Library was a great idea. People could come and share their messages and diary entries, and read strangers’ tales and confessions. But something about the experience unleashed something awful on the city, causing a period of “collective psychosis” and murders that no one could explain or understand for 20 horrible nights. The city collectively decides to put the Library away forever, but years later, a man looks into the mystery. This 1970s Italian cult classic features a slowly unraveling plot that took much too long to be translated into English.
Want more great horror reads? Check out my list of fun spins on the classic creatures you think you know (vampires, werewolves, and mermaids, oh my!) or fellow Rioter Addison Rizer’s list of eight literary horror reads.
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