Like many new writers, I fell into the trap of believing that serious literature meant realist literature. I toiled away for years, trying my best to write in a style that doesn’t suit me, until one pivotal class at the 2018 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop when Caitlin Horrocks assigned Karen Russell’s “Engineering Impossible Architectures” and Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch.” Russell’s is a craft essay that introduces the “Kansas:Oz Ratio” to guide a writer in effectively juxtaposing realistic (Kansas) and fantastic (Oz) details; Machado’s is a short story that’s more astonishing with each read. What struck me most was how these and other genre-bending authors tackled very human subjects—family, relationships, mental health, motherhood, growing up, belonging—and used some sort of presence to heighten the effect. Introducing speculative elements into fiction such as devils, demons, dogs, doppelgängers, or any number of non-human or superhuman entities is a great technique for underpinning characters’ psychological states, flaws, and behaviors. It’s also a strategy that can be used to reach toward the inarticulable messiness of the human condition. Each of us contains entire worlds—how do we contend with a truth that large?
My debut novel, Sister Creatures, follows four women from the same small town in Louisiana and a supernatural entity that haunts them. The story begins with my protagonist, Tess, working as a live-in babysitter to two kids in an isolated house and is way too irresponsible for the job—she spends her time day drinking and reading horror novels. In from the woods comes a strange teenager, Gail, who lives off grid with her religious zealot family. The single day they spend together informs the rest of the book, which spans three decades and various locations. The novel contains a doppelgänger, sinister triplets, dark things happening in dark woods, and an entity that appears at various times as a creepy doll, a snake, and a demon. Adding these speculative elements helped me achieve a deeper level of truth and meaning than I was able to reach through a realist approach. They were also a lot of fun to write and provided the spark I needed to sustain me through an entire novel. The following ten books, all published within the last decade, feature some sort of entity or presence that looms over the lives of their characters, and they’re all incredibly enjoyable reads.
The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis
The citizens of Little Nettlebed are more enlightened than the witch-hunting generations that preceded them. Or so they’d like to think. When the five Mansfield sisters act outside of societal norms, defying the rules in place “for their protection,” they are looked upon with suspicion. After wounding the feelings of the town ferryman (and town drunkard) and inciting his rage, rumors swirl: the devil has touched these girls and bestowed upon them the ability to transform into dogs. Many villagers, already stressed by heat, drought, their river drying up and their crops failing, are more than happy to have an object of blame. Purvis demonstrates the ways that gossip and resentment can catch fire, spreading through a community and leading to mob mentality. With glimpses of devils, angels, and supernatural dogs, Purvis explores the horror of our inability to simply exist freely.
Hellions by Julia Elliott
Monsters, beasts, creepy dolls, a mystic manuscript, a Swamp Ape, a Wild Professor, and Pazuzu, the demon from The Exorcist. The eleven stories in this collection have it all. Through the use of myriad fantastical elements, Elliott explores the clashing worlds of children and adults, and how one can never fully understand the other. Much of the collection is set in small-town South Carolina, where the children are hellions, left to tear it up in their wild and swampy environment. In their eyes, the adults are stuck, static. They stay indoors, drinking too much while the world spins around them. From the adult perspective, the children are feral, strange creatures that evoke suspicion and even fear. Rendered in hyper-specific prose, Hellions evokes an underlying tension and uncertainty that feels very true to the human experience. I recommend this book to everyone.
Mystery Lights by Lena Valencia
This story collection is a must-read for the increasingly weird times in which we’re living. These ten strange, dynamic stories feature several close encounters, sometimes with the supernatural and the alien, but also with the sinister forces of our real world and even our own worst tendencies. Many of these stories take place in stark U.S. desert landscapes, where people visit to experience the unexplainable and to infuse some mystery into their lives; where dangers lurk around every corner and cultish figures thrive; and where someone can simply walk out into the surrounding vastness and disappear. Valencia does a masterful job at exploring female relationships, power dynamics, rage, and the vulnerabilities of inhabiting a female body. The stories, though unconnected (except for a wonderfully surprising turn at the end), build upon one another and reach toward the sublime.
Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Ananda Lima
Lima imbues the pages of this innovative story collection with pieces of her very soul. One of my favorite reads of last year, this book is difficult to summarize. The nine fantastic stories in Craft are separated by interstitial 3rd-person sections following “the writer” and the Devil whom she encounters many times throughout her life. This meta framing makes for a playful, smart, fun, and weird read. It also gave me the rare experience of considering the author herself while reading. This book is full of mischief, and the addition of the Devil makes it richer. The Devil—magnetic, sad, misunderstood—is the first to recognize our protagonist as a writer, the one to help her understand the nature of stories, time, the human condition, and life’s complexities. The Devil made the writer’s life richer, just as Craft has made my life richer.
Ghostroots by ’Pemi Aguda
“Let the past stay there, abeg. There are stories we leave buried so our children can move without weight,” a woman warns her niece in the opening pages of Ghostroots. Well, I’m here to tell you: in the twelve stories of this dark and absorbing collection, the children are burdened; the past will unearth. Set in Lagos, much of the horror in this book arises from the characters themselves, from their situations, their inheritance, their own flawed natures. Though every single story merits an entire essay, the final one will stay with me forever. It’s about a ten-year-old boy who encounters three intricately-costumed, impossibly tall, and incredibly uncanny magical masked dancers—Aguda refers to them as “masquerades”—who gift themselves to him. This story, like much of Aguda’s writing, is a great example of how adding an eerie entity can articulate the inarticulable. In this case, Aguda puts her finger on feelings of intense desire, of familial obligations, and of how we take from those we most love.
Upcountry by Chin-Sun Lee
One of my all-time favorites, Lee’s novel is the ultimate gothic read. This is a fast-paced book with big, surprising moments of action that are hard to pull off (though Lee nails them), and an ever-present undertone of dread and unease thrumming below the surface. Set in the Catskills during the Great Recession, Upcountry is the story of three women in conflict with each other: April, a down-on-her-luck local forced to give up her family home in foreclosure; Claire, the comparatively well-to-do Manhattanite who buys it in an attempt to make a fresh start with her increasingly-distant husband; and the very pregnant Anna, a member of a nearby cult-like religious group who becomes the object of Claire’s husband’s obsession. This story of calamity and resilience takes place under the specter of a presence that’s unknown until the wholly satisfying end that I won’t spoil but very much encourage you to discover for yourself.
Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin
There are two types of people in the world of Schweblin’s captivating novel: keepers & dwellers. Either you keep a Kentuki—a toy of uncannily janky quality, made to resemble various animals such as crows, moles, and pandas—or you dwell in one, surveilling your keeper through a concealed camera and microphone. A keeper and dweller are paired together randomly, from any place on the planet. A keeper might want a companion, or maybe a captive audience for their exhibitionist tendencies, or perhaps simply the newest product on shelves. A dweller might be experiencing a crushing loneliness, or they may be a pedophile hoping for a victim, or they’re someone who needs a means of escape from their sad reality. Whether the technology corrupts or simply exacerbates human flaws, with the help of these creepy little inanimate animals, Little Eyes—translated by the great Megan McDowell—explores the dark corners of human psychology.
The Need by Helen Phillips
I have a theory that every one of us contains a doppelgänger story, and Phillips’s is one of the best. Molly, a paleobotanist and mother of two small children, works in a fossil quarry called the Pit, where, in addition to ancient plant life, they discover objects that are just slightly…off: a Coca-Cola bottle with the wrong font, a plastic toy soldier manufactured with a monkey’s tail, a wrongly-shaped Altoids tin, a Bible with one conspicuous alteration. The Bible in particular brings more visitors and more funding to the Pit, but it also brings a fair share of hostility. These work stresses bleed into Molly’s home life, where an unwelcome presence enters and threatens the wellbeing of her children. With one of the tensest openings I’ve ever read, The Need explores the bewilderment and dread of motherhood, of caretaking, of being responsible for such tiny, vulnerable bodies.
What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi
During Talia Lakshmi Kolluri’s brilliant 2023 Tin House lecture on writing non-human consciousness, she referenced an Oyeyemi short story about sentient puppets that’s part of this collection. I immediately knew it was a book for me. This nine-story collection is uniformly excellent, brimming with stories within stories within stories, found letters, various locked doors, and mysterious keys. “Is Your Blood As Red As This?” (the sentient puppet story) is a standout. It’s never quite clear whether people are using the puppets or vice versa. Sure, people manipulate puppets to make them perform. Yet a puppet’s lifespan is considerably longer than a human’s, and it uses people’s hands and voices to express itself and to exist fully. Puppetry is an art that can foster lifelong play, yet in this story about power dynamics and shifting allegiances, “play” can quickly morph into manipulative little games.
Mr. Splitfoot by Samantha Hunt
In one of the most charming literary moments I’ve ever encountered, Charlotte Brontë, speaking through a medium, blurbs this book…and you absolutely need to read it for that to make sense. Ruth and Nat, two orphans closer than sisters, emancipate themselves a year early from the Love of Christ! foster home and attempt to make a life for themselves by contacting people’s dead loved ones for money. Fourteen years later, Ruth’s niece Cora finds herself pregnant by a married, sadistic man. The two women set off on a journey, on foot, to take care of some unfinished business. Set in upstate New York and alternating between these dual timelines, Mr. Splitfoot features cults, sinister folk, mothers both good and bad, and the thin veil between what we can see and that which lies beyond. This book is strange, thrilling, and remarkably touching.