Since Halloween is ‘creeping’ up on us and this is a writers’ blog that leans toward horror, I thought I’d list some lesser-known spooky books I’ve read that gave me a serious case of the creeps, in case you might be looking for something in that ‘vein’ to read this Halloween season. (Puns intended; don’t be a coward, intend your puns!)
I’m not going to list any ‘classics’ here, since you’re probably already familiar with many of the works of the likes of Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allen Poe, Stephen King, Anne Rice, Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, Clive Barker, Richard Matheson, Peter Straub, William Peter Blatty, Thomas Tryon, and so on. Further disclaimers: I read a lot but I haven’t read absolutely everything, so this will be a somewhat incomplete (and of course, subjective) list; and some of these books won’t strictly fit the definition of horror, but I’ll include them because they nonetheless did give me the creeps.
So here are 13 (because it’s Halloween!) selections that might be under your radar, and that I recall reading with a memorably palpable sense of trepidation and dread:
CHURCH MOUSE (R.H. Hale): Hands down the best vampire novel I’ve ever read next to Dracula; and even creepier IMO.
LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (John Ajvide Lindqvist): A lonely Swedish boy and his, well, let’s just say not a dog.
THE HISTORIAN (Elizabeth Kostova): Who decided to hire that creepy librarian? I mean come on, his name was Vlad!
SLADE HOUSE (David Mitchell): If you find an interesting-looking door in an alley and think it might be that famous ‘no-name’ restaurant, think again.
LAST DAYS (Brian Evenson): Fancy joining a secret club based on self-mutilation? Well, here you go.
AMERICAN PSYCHO (Bret Easton Ellis): I too have always liked the music of Huey Lewis & the News (and it covers up the sound of my chainsaw).
NEVER LET ME GO (Kazuo Ishiguro): A truly chilling sci-fi take on the lengths that the wealthy might one day go to in order to prolong their lives.
JACK OF SPADES (Joyce Carol Oates): Funny to see her on this list, eh? Watch out for that nefarious pseudonym!
KINK (Crowley Barns): A case of mistaken identity? Well, not really. Do not read while eating.
THE HANDMAID’S TALE (Margaret Atwood): Not true horror, but still chilled me to the bone.
PIRANESI (Susanna Clarke): Technically more of a sci-fi fantasy-type work, but it was one of the inspirations for my Toilet Bot Diaries series of risque horror sci-fi AI novellas (Cloacina Maxima et al).
I HAVE NO MOUTH, AND I MUST SCREAM (Harlan Ellison): This one is technically a short story, but it’s a powerful one that thoroughly appalled me. An AI that hates humans, eradicates almost all of us, and ruthlessly tortures the few that it spared for that very purpose.
CROWLEY’S CULT (by our own Andrea Merchak!): Fine art meets the occult. This one creeped me out even more than her Bloody serial killer series did. You remember the occultist Aleister Crowley, right?
I suppose I could also include my own Canny Danny on this list. It’s a sort of pseudo-Lovecraftian mashup of Misery, Cabin in the Woods, and Fifty Shades of Grey. I think the main reason it gave me the creeps (even though I’m the one who wrote it) is that it exposed depths of depravity that I wasn’t previously aware I could be capable of.
And now here’s one that’s way under the radar — since it’s never been published. While writing this post, I felt motivated to craft a new creepy short-short for your entertainment on this special occasion. This story arose from a thought I had (apropos of nothing) regarding the mathematical restriction on division by zero. Bear with me for a moment while I explain…
You see, zero is a very special — nay, the most special — number in arithmetic (even more special than 13 and 666!). It’s the boundary between ‘something’ and ‘nothing’, and it’s this boundary that makes arithmetic coherent. If we remove zero or change how it behaves, everything starts working differently. That’s why an expression like [1 / 0] is said to be “undefined”.
Here are some illustrations. Start with a simple equation: [A / 0 = B], rather than [A / 0 = undefined]. Multiplying both sides by zero and canceling, we get [A = B x 0], which reduces to [A = 0]. So all possible values of A equal zero, whether A = 1, or 2, or 999, or any other number. Everything equals zero, which makes arithmetic just a bunch of senseless noise. So what if we instead say [A / 0 = infinity]? The same thing happens: [A = infinity x 0 = 0]. Finally, what if we decide to say [A / 0 = A]? After all, if you’re dividing something by nothing, then you’re not dividing it all, right? So [A / 0 = A], which means [A = A x 0 = 0], and all numbers again equal zero. If you try any of these tricks, it isn’t just a small tweak, especially that last one; it forces every other rule of arithmetic to mutate in order to have any hope of being left with a system with some semblance of usefulness. And it would ultimately break not just arithmetic as we know it, but everything else that depends on it, such as algebra, calculus, geometry, physics, and logic.
What then would happen to human knowledge if math became inconsistent? Well, truth would no longer be able to be absolutely proven. What would happen to the universe itself? Nothing — but our interpretation of the universe would change. Reality would no longer be fundamentally mathematical, since Plato’s ideal of mathematics as the language of reality would be out the window.
So I agree, let’s not divide by zero! But what might happen if some mathematician accidentally did do something like this in an otherwise sound mathematical proof because it was logically unavoidable, or managed to prove some other significant mathematical contradiction that should be impossible in our universe?
“Pleased to present, for your consideration” a fictional horror/sci-fi type scenario that could be an answer to that question:
[ UNPROVEN ]
The first portal opened in a classroom of an American university science building, during an evening seminar on mathematical logic. The chalkboard was covered in symbols — dense, looping expressions about set membership and ordinal collapse — when the professor paused mid‑proof, his chalk hand hovering in the air.
“No,” he whispered. The students leaned forward. This professor was not a man who whispered. He stepped back from the board, staring at the last line he’d written. It was a contradiction, a formal contradiction derived from the standard axioms, something that should have been impossible.
The chalkboard shimmered, not metaphorically or poetically, but physically as the symbols written on it began to move. The contradiction itself pulsed like a heartbeat and the chalk lines bent inward, folding into a shape no one in the room could comprehend. Then the board bulged outward, as if something behind it were trying to press its way through.
The surface of the board tore and a thin slit opened. Its interior was black and depthless, and it hummed in a tone that made the students’ teeth ache. Cold air spilled out, carrying a smell like wet stone and old paper.
The professor staggered back from the board. “Don’t look directly at it!” he commanded, but everyone already was.
Then something moved inside the slit. It was not a creature, not yet, but rather more like a geometry that had learned to walk. Angles flexed, lines rearranged themselves, and a shape stepped forward, unfolding like a theorem being proven in reverse.
It had too many edges. It had no face. It made no sound. But every student felt it thinking.
Then the portal snapped shut and the chalkboard was made whole again, and pristine to boot. The contradiction was gone – but the shape remained. It stood in the center of the room, its angles slowly rotating, casting shadows that didn’t match the overhead lights. The students backed away, but the shape didn’t move toward them. It simply observed. And then it dissolved — not in a vanishing manner, but by dispersing into a pattern of faint lines that slid under the door and into the hallway.
Within hours, similar contradictions appeared across the world: in a proof in Berlin, a combinatorial identity in Tokyo, a category‑theoretic diagram in Montreal, and so on. Each contradiction opened a portal, and each portal released something. Some of the shapes were small, and skittered across floors like living tangents. Some were tall and drifted through walls like forgotten corollaries. Some whispered in voices made of prime numbers.
Governments tried to contain them, and failed. And though the shapes were not overtly hostile, they were not passive. They explored, they learned, and they multiplied.
By the third night, other portal-like fractures became visible without chalkboards. They appeared out of thin air, thin luminous cracks that vibrated with a sound of unsolved equations. People began seeing impossible things: a staircase in New York that looped back into itself, a river in China that flowed in two directions simultaneously, a shadow in New Zealand that belonged to no object, a child in Brazil who spoke in perfect Gödel numbering.
The world didn’t collapse — but it bent. Reality became a fabric under strain, pulled by the weight of contradictions that should never have existed.
The shapes grew more complex. Some resembled creatures, but only in the way a fractal resembles a coastline. They moved with purpose, studying our architecture, touching our machines, tracing patterns in dust. One appeared in a parking lot, towering over the cars, its surface covered in shifting equations. Every time someone looked away, the equations changed. The creature leaned down toward a man frozen beside his car, and its surface rippled. Then a single line of text appeared across its body: We did not come from elsewhere, we came from your mistakes. Then it straightened and walked away, its steps leaving no prints.
On the seventh day, the largest contradiction appeared — not in a university, not in a lab, but in the sky. A huge crack opened across the clouds, a glowing fissure stretching from horizon to horizon. Through it, people glimpsed a world made of pure mathematics: spirals of infinite dimension, forests of branching proofs, oceans of shifting topology. And something vast moved behind it all — something that had noticed the fractures, something that had been waiting for them. The fissure widened, and the world held its breath. Then the crack snapped shut, leaving only silence and a faint smell of chalk dust drifting across the continents.
After that, the contradictions stopped and no new portals appeared. But the shapes remained. They wander the world now, quiet, curious, and impossible. They slip through walls, trace symbols in frost, rearrange pebbles into perfect geometric lattices. No one knows what they are, and no one knows what they want.
On the thirteenth day, mathematicians feverishly researching the shapes acknowledged a new fear — that the contradictions didn’t open portals to other universes, as had been conjectured; they instead opened portals to parts of our own universe that we were perhaps never meant to see. They now think the things that came through them were not invaders, but were rather just residents here, like ourselves.
Residents that we simply hadn’t proven yet.
Q.E.D. (THE END)
Who knew math could be creepy? Did this little tale give you the creeps? Well, being somewhat of a geek myself, it felt creepy to me. And to quote a famous movie character, “That’s all I have to say about that.”
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
😊
