I'm looking for something that isn't just gore or torture but something with a thick miasma of true spookiness. Having killers or monsters are fine, but I want them disturbing instead of just intimidating. My favorite are humans that still seem humanoid but have deformities/lore that make them unsettling.
Negative Space scratched the same itch on me
The House on the Borderland
I’m hesitant to say it’s a good book but at least the first 1/3-2/3 is. The book is A King Alone by Giono. Weird eerie atmosphere. Rural 19th century France. Strange disappearances. A detective called in. A man going up a tree. A nest of bodies. Very strange book. Almost purely atmospheric but I don’t think I got the end or understood the theme or message. The wolf hunt was goodish. The search for a wife was head scratching
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles. Murakami isn’t popular on this board but I loved this book. Surreal and eerie
Murakami is great at capturing that weird surreal eerie feeling only the Japanese know how to conjure up. LSD Dream Emulator is a great example of this but in probably the most different medium imaginable.
>Murakami is great at capturing that weird surreal eerie feeling only the Japanese know how to conjure up.
Wooahh dude I'm just going to write about a normie who has sex and listens to the beatles it's going to be so surreal and psychedelic and eerie
Hey, the Beatles have a lot of songs that are creepier than they get credit for.
Also picrel by Murakami is fricking weird and unsettling and it's literally meant for middle-schoolers.
The Search for Joseph Tully
This review inspired me to read the book:
http://toomuchhorrorfiction.blogspot.com/2010/10/search-for-joseph-tully-by-william-h.html
A very enjoyable read, with a great sense of eerie/disturbing atmosphere.
Adam Nevill, The Ritual: has a great immersive sense of mood and atmosphere, conjuring up an oppressive feeling of dread.
Machen, The Great God Pan
Algernon Blackwood, The Wendigo. (Many prefer his story, The Willows, precisely for the eerie mood; but that one didn't really come off for me.)
The Haunting of Hill House
Silent Snow, Secret Snow by Conrad Aiken. A minor classic.
A lot of Ramsey Campbell's stories have a disturbing/eerie atmosphere; it's probably his greatest strength as a writer. I found The Grin of the Dark quite effective on this front.
The Wendigo creeped me out so badly. I can't get out of my head that scene where the guy runs through that snowy desert yelling about his feet. Genuinely terrifying.
Lovecraft and Poe are a given
The October Country
Lazarus by Andreyev
La Vénus d'Ille
The Pale Man by Julius Long
The Voice in the Night by William Hope Hodgson
A Rose for Emily
Là-Bas by Huysman, great atmospheric book about Satanic rituals
>The Ritual
I can't read this after seeing the horrid netflix adaptation
The works of Arthur Machen. In particular,
The White People(short story) and The Hill of Dreams(Novel). He may very well be the greatest writer of eerie atmosphere in the English language.
Also, give "Boy in Darkness" by Mervyn Peake a read.
The White People kinda creeped me out. It had serious pedo undertones if I’m remembering correctly
Its about a young girl being seduced into a witches cult where she eventually bears the child of some demon. But the story is so symbolic and vague is unclear exactly what's going.
I like Suffer the Little Children by Stephen King because he doesn't outright describe what the horrible faces look like when they twist into the spooky nightmare creatures. Makes your brain do all the painting. But it's not just atmosphere, there's a climax and remains intriguing the whole way through.
Very unsettling
What the frick is this?
Kino
the femoid equivalent of goyslop
Gateways to Abomination, by Matthew Barnett. I really love it. It's short, weird, and eerie.
The Fassbinder Diaries, by James Pate. It might not be exactly what you're looking for, and it isn't horror. But it was feverishly eerie at times. I quite enjoyed it.
I can't find these kind of faces scary or creepy anymore because they just make me think of basedboys.
Would you be open to a scary non-fiction book?
Les chants de Maldoror corresponds perfectly with what you say you're looking for
You might like Roadside Picnic by Strugatsky, there's some existential dread in it that you might like.
The House of the Seven Gables, it's a very overlooked book by Nathaniel Hawthorne but it has this very tender presence to it that feels like a natural haunting to you as you read. I'm curious if any other anon has read it
The Picture of Dorian Grey is the only one I know that has that 'off' kind of feeling
I don't know why, but that one story in King in Yellow about the reoccurring dream always spooks me the frick out. Forgot which one it was, but just read the whole thing it's not that long
the Willows by algernon blackwood
the Night Ocean by Lovecraft (one of my favorites of his, very thick atmosphere)