10 Books That Haunted Me

Top Ten Tuesday is currently hosted by Artsy Reader Girl and has weekly topics for bloggers to respond to and share a love of all things books! I love thinking up my responses and the weekly blog hop to see what everyone else wrote!

This week’s prompt is a Hallowe’en freebie. I don’t really read horror books, but I decided to list books that have haunted me in some way.

Most of these are scary because they are based on truth. In all these cases, the author took inspiration from real life, and these are things that have actually happened (or are happening) in the world.

1. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood – Atwood says she didn’t make up anything in this book; it’s all based on things that have happened somewhere in the world. It is terrifying how close the horrors in this book feel… and the fact that the USA appear to be taking daily steps towards actually becoming The Gilead.
2. Kindred by Octavia E. Butler – This book is genius and a brutal exploration of slavery that uses time travel really cleverly as a literary device when a black woman from the 1970s ends up on her own ancestors’ 19th-century Maryland Plantation. At times, this was very difficult to read; it’s simply told, and Butler does not shy away from the reality of life and the choices our protagonist is faced with.
3. Asking For It by Louise O’Niell – This book is a tough read because it is too real. Set in Ireland but based on the Steubenville Rape Case, the story is told from the point of view of the young girl who is struggling with shame and unable to accept that what happened to her was rape. It is enraging and deeply unsettling.
4. We Spread by Iain Reid – I’d call this one ‘weird lit.’ and it is closer to a horror story than others so far. The scariest aspect for me was being in the point of view of a powerless and confused elderly woman who may be suffering from dementia. Aren’t we all afraid of growing old, and alone, and losing our minds?
5. A Storm of Swords by George R. R. Marten – This is the third book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series, and it’s the one with The Red Wedding. GRRM took inspiration from historical events, but it’s also the level of emotional investment I had in the characters at this point and how truly devastating it was to read! I never had that experience reading before or since.
6. Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix – This is also in the horror genre, and the true horror of it for me was the childbirth scenes. Childbirth in the 1970s Southern USA, if you’re an unwed teenage girl? There are no monsters scarier than that.
7. 1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell – I’m grouping them together because they share a similar theme. Totalitarian governments have and do exist, and honestly, the concept of doublethink only seems to get more relevant by the day. It is terrifying how easy it is to manipulate people against their own interests.
8. My Husband by Maud Ventura – This book is like being inside the anxiety spiral of an obsessive and increasingly paranoid woman as she lives a very typical week as a wife and mother. This whole thing was tense reading. I never knew where things were going to go!
9. Say Cheese And Die by R. L. Stine – I mentioned this last year, my teen horror favourites lost. It remains the Goosebumps book that most freaked me out. I think it’s the powerlessness of knowing how your loved ones will die but not being able to stop it.
10. The Langoliers in Four Past Midnight by Stephen King – I might be because I read this as a teenager on a plane … But I think this is the only King book that has genuinely freaked me out! I am going to have to re-read it sometime.