Richard Adams’ Watership Down and Ted Hughes’s Iron Man duology left indelible marks on me growing up – visions of lacerated habitats packaged as fairy tales. Like the Iron Man’s unexplained arrival, stories of world transformations abruptly unfolding for no known reason have also always left a mark, like in J.H. Rosny Aîné’s Le Cataclysme, wherein the laws of physics suddenly change, devastating civilisation.

The most desolated I’ve ever been by a book? William Hope Hodgson’s 1912 The Night Land, which imagines life on Earth after the sun has died. The final few million humans cluster in a titanic, metallic ziggurat, lit by residual volcanic energy. They peer out through long telescopes into the surrounding darkness, documenting mountain-tall, barely-visible shapes, gradually encroaching as the final magmic fires fade.

The most downright terrified I’ve been by a book? When The Wind Blows, a 1982 graphic novel by Raymond Briggs. A far cry from Briggs’s The Snowman, this one depicts an elderly, working-class couple whose kitchen-sink existence is interrupted by thermonuclear war. I came across a copy aged around 12. The unflinching depiction of their demise from radiation sickness, jarring with the innocence of Briggs’ cartoonish illustration, undeniably fomented my interest in risks to our continued life today.

Thomas Moynihan

As a child, I was terrified of Stephen King’s It – not because of the story, but because of what I imagined it contained. I remember seeing multiple copies of it in hardback on display in the adult fiction section of my childhood library and knowing that it wasn’t for me, that I needed to be older before I could read it. The blood-red font in all caps with the gray author title against a black background seemed different to the rest of the books in the library, like it knew about me, too. It took me several trips, studying the book from afar, before I asked to check the book out, a little surprised when my mom didn’t say no. I took it home and closed my door and set it on my desk, trying to decide whether I should read it, always deferring before I even opened it. I couldn’t sleep that night, aware of it watching me, exuding evil. Suddenly, everything seemed subject to change. I stayed up all night, waiting for dawn. I gave the book back to my mom and asked if we could return it immediately. Years later, I’d come to love King, but I’ve still never read It.

Blake Butler

The scariest thing I’ve ever read is Franz Kafka’s short story “In The Penal Colony”, about a condemned prisoner whose sentence is slowly inscribed on his body with an etching machine. I couldn’t finish it and had to literally cover the page with my hands, the way at certain points of a slasher movie you cover your eyes. The person I was living with at the time was teaching this story in a graduate class, and he’d talk enthusiastically about the clinical prose, the detachment. Well, yes, exactly. I think accounts of atrocity and brutality are always much scarier than ghosts.

Chris Kraus

My Bones and My Flute by Edgar Austin Mittelholzer. I had to put this book down halfway through reading it. It’s almost as if you hear that haunted melody yourself and a dense feeling of being watched throughout… I hear the flute... It felt even more tragic and ghostly after reading about Mittelholzer himself after finishing the novel.

Luna Carmoon

In the fourth grade, three important things happened to me. First, I was given a parakeet for my ninth birthday. I named her Lizzy, in honor of my most recently deceased pet, Skinker, who was a lizard (a skink). Every day after school, I opened the white wire gate to Lizzy’s cage, and she fluttered to my shoulder to eat pistachios from my hand. She trusted me implicitly.

Second, I was assigned to read Wilson Rawls’ Where the Red Fern Grows at school. In the story, a young boy earns the loyalty of two valiant hunting dogs as they go on adventures together in the woods of Oklahoma. They trust each other implicitly.

Third, I was prescribed glasses, which I discovered I needed while trying to read the book in class. I loved how they made me look like a little genius. I wanted to share my new look with Lizzy, who let me draw a pair of glasses on her sweet, expectant face in exchange for a nut. Her large, round nostrils quivered as I passed the black Sharpie over them. I handed her a pistachio, and she took a very, very long time to eat it.

The next morning, when I went to give Lizzy my customary pre-school kiss, I found her lying sideways on the floor of her cage. She was stiff and cold. She had died overnight from the marker fumes.

That day at school, I read the final chapter of Where the Red Fern Grows, in which the boy’s beloved dogs die saving him from a mountain lion. As I read the passage aloud, my voice cracked, and I burst into ugly, gelatinous tears in front of the entire class. I was overcome with grief and horror.

At the end of the story, a blood-red fern sprouts up from where the heroic dogs lay buried – an auspicious Indigenous symbol of a sacred act. Meanwhile, Lizzy lay crumpled in the back of my freezer next to Skinker, who I had still not buried, wrapped in cling film and slowly gathering fish-smelling ice crystals. She still had a pair of cartoon glasses crudely scribbled across her sunken, grey face. My little dead genius.

I was terrified that I was an irredeemable murderer and a monster. I was terrified that I was inauspicious, cursed – that a black, not a red, fern would grow from wherever I buried Lizzy. I was terrified that everyone could see my horrible true nature in the shameful tears streaming down my face – the crocodile tears of the devil. The pearly white gates had slammed shut, never to open again; and Lizzy was on the other side, glaring at me through her stupid Sharpie glasses, eating a pistachio so very, very slowly.

Charlie Engman

Bible Study as a barely teen, reading all the passages of condemnation and hellfire that were quoted by evangelists on TV who said AIDS was god’s punishment, terrified me. Was I going to burn for eternity in agony for jerking off to Matt Dillon in Bop magazine? Was I going to be stoned to death in the streets by the righteous? I lost sleep, I cried, I prayed. I was tormented. And I shoplifted more issues of Bop from the mall. I’d been a wobbly believer since childhood, but my family was devout. The thought that people I loved accepted this as truth was so horrible it was untenable, and called what I’d thought about both them and god into question. Unlike most stories from life, this one has a happy ending: I became an atheist and left home at fifteen.

Nate Lippens

Simone Weil jolts me awake. The French philosopher was born in 1909, the same year the Futurists rallied under Marinetti’s manifesto, the year Joan of Arc was beatified. Most of Weil’s writings were published posthumously, after her death in exile. In the 34 years of her life, she immersed herself in spiritual and political struggle. Weil was the consummate insider-outsider, though she recklessly strove to obliterate that distinction. The first time I read Gravity and Grace, I was confronted with the propulsive force of her thinking and I was frightened by her honesty. On suffering, she laid bare the stakes, the chasm between the wounded and the witness, the intolerability of love. Weil refuses consolation, all “the compensatory reactions by which we try to fill up the hollows bitten into us by reality.” She preferred, as she wrote, real hell to an imaginary paradise. Weil grappled with suffering, ran towards it, trying to grasp its truth. At times, she was clumsy. I think of her burdening fellow Parisian factory workers, and then on the frontlines of the Spanish Civil War, accidentally spilling boiling oil on her leg. Hers is a kind of commitment so fervent and unrestrained, it shimmers, even terrifies.

Momtaza Mehri

The scariest piece of writing currently rattling around in my head is not a book but rather the lyrics to “The Beast in Me”. Originally written by Nick Lowe and performed by his stepfather-in-law Johnny Cash in 1994, the song is bare, introspective, and aching, a poetic and oddly lackadaisical description of a man’s secret inner violence and addictions. The singer seems perturbed by the beast within him, yet also at ease with it: he knows you cannot rid yourself of such demons forever. You can either learn to control them or be wrenched apart by the things you hunger for. “God help the beast in me / Sometimes it tries to kid me / That it’s just a teddy bear / And even somehow manage to vanish in the air / And that is when I must beware / Of the beast in me.” You can choose which version of the song makes you shiver more, Johnny Cash’s sullen and sonorous one or Nick Lowe’s whispery, warmer one (played over the credits in the pilot episode of The Sopranos). Both men’s voices have a certain heaviness that haunts me, a bony sense of weariness, a longing to be freed of their self-destructive urges. And yet they also seem to accept the futility of this longing, instead coexisting with their darkness and asking God to help not themselves, but the beast they lug about and secretly feed. “They’ve seen him out dressed in my clothes / Patently unclear if it’s New York or New Year / God help the beast in me.”

Brittany Newell

My parents once had a dinner party where we all ended up going round in a circle and describing the movie that had terrified us the most. Someone chose Cape Fear, explaining the plot in such vivid and hyper-specific detail, incident by demented incident, that it was as if it had happened to him. He arrived at the part where the vengeance-crazed Robert De Niro character straps himself to the underside of the Jeep, and said, “That’s when you realise: Jesus Christ, this guy will stop at nothing.” A palm flat on the table. “Nothing.”

No big deal, you suggest. Cape Fear is a famously silly movie, is what you say. Me, I got so scared I couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t the specifics of the story that made me go all cold and prickly; it was the straightforward, harrowing concept of a guy who will stop at nothing. A guy for whom there are neither limits nor rules, who seems as if he does not sleep, and behaves as if he will never die. Jesus Christ. I couldn’t handle it. Knowing how ridiculous I was being did not make my skin crawl any less. I thought about it all the time, to the point that I had to consciously force myself to stop.

Years pass, and I am on a beach in Goa with my best friend. We are both drinking mango lassis from the moment we wake up, and every day we eat a huge fish that has been pulled out of the glittering ocean directly in front of our spindly, colourful beach huts. It is an extraordinarily peaceful environment. Nothing scary anywhere, until my friend finishes the novel he has been reading, and suggests I give it a go. It’s Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy’s baroque masterpiece about scalp hunters in the American West.

The notional protagonist of Blood Meridian is a kid called “the kid”, but really it is Judge Holden, a figure of pure, fathomless evil, war incarnate, violence made flesh. He is nearly seven feet tall, “as bald as a stone”, with small hands and dainty little feet, a “great hairless thing” who can outdance the devil himself. He is often naked. He belongs to a totally different moral universe from any of the other characters, or indeed anyone on Earth, real or imagined. He kills all kinds of people, but especially little girls, and says things like “whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.” He is a great favourite. He says that he will never die.

Judge Holden, a figure so ornamentally sinister and depraved that he should be laughed off the page, and yet he is terrifying. It’s objectively funny to imagine an overwrought Cormac McCarthy straining with all his might to invent the most fucked-up psycho imaginable, sitting down at his desk to sketch out a portrait of the actual boogeyman, but despite all this, the Judge gives everyone the shivers. When they try to explain why, they tend mainly towards answers involving the debauched bloodlust underlying western expansion, or something about the constancy of evil on this bitch of an earth.

This is all true, probably, but as I came to realise while lying on my deckchair as if pinned to it, sweating, unable to take even one bite of my enormous fish, the thing that makes the Judge so, so scary is that he is, at bottom, a guy who will stop at nothing. He is perhaps the guy who will stop at nothing. I even said it out loud, when I got to the part where the ex-priest is telling the kid about the Judge making gunpowder (“the Judge on his knees kneading the mass with his naked arms and the piss was splashin about and he cried to us piss man, piss for your very souls”). Jesus Christ.

The ocean suddenly took on a greasy sheen. Our colourful spindly beach huts looked all at once like a place where an evil fugitive might choose to hide, to crouch panting under the bed. I felt like one of the people in that movie Bird Box, where they see something so scary that they have to die. That I knew the Judge is a fundamentally absurd character made no difference at all, made it worse, in a way, because here is a figure so frightening that he demolishes your ability to impose an ironic distance. I wish I could explain it better. He dances in light and in shadow. He will stop at nothing.

Rosa Lyster

The most frightening book I’ve ever come across is Aurelio Baldor’s Algebra – a thick and heavy volume that’s not only used in Bolivian high schools but also serves as a mediating object in Santa Catalina, a very popular game where teenagers summon spirits. These spirits will answer any question you throw at them, but in return, they might drive you insane or kill you.

Liliana Colanzi

I was 13 and in my first proper boyfriend’s living room – he lived with his dad, who worked away most of the time. My boyfriend and I had been going out for about four months, and he and his friend had become obsessed with the film Fight Club, having bought a pirate copy of the film from the guy that sold DVDs out of his bag at the bus station. Watching it every day was soon not enough, so they combined funds and bought a copy of the Chuck Palahniuk book, which they would read aloud to each other before moving the furniture around in the room and wrestling. During all this, I would sit to the side. While they were wrestling, I would take the book and sit in the kitchen and read, turning my back on the complicated physical intimacy this book afforded them.

I remember feeling on the brink of so much and being frightened by it all – how this narrative could enforce such bravado, such behaviour, that I found so deeply exclusionary. How it felt like the collapse of everything, but with a glamour I didn’t understand, a kind of glamour so entrenched in masculinity. It didn’t bring about an unrest or stir in me the anti-capitalist revolution they thought it did in them. I was scared and disjointed. It made me feel dumb in a way that didn’t make me want to learn more. It was the first time I remember being scared to say I didn’t understand, feeling that this was perhaps only a very male thing to know. The millennium bug was still haunting us, and the world was starting to seep into my adolescence in a way that felt like it was something I was eventually going to have to deal with rather than my parents. The book felt electric, but not in a way that was compelling: rather, it was like accidentally touching an electric fence and it rejects you. It made me feel on the outside, removed, vulnerable. I know now that wasn’t as much to do with the text and more to do with those two boys in the living room, but still, the feeling persists.

Lisette May Monroe

As a child I was scared of everything, in every book: vampires, witches, headless horsemen, demon headmasters. But in adulthood? The end of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. Willing Newland Archer to walk up the stairs, knowing he won’t, realising there’s something in him, some profoundly powerful and incurably habitual mechanism of repression, which means he actually can’t. Reading it feels like emotional sleep paralysis.

Helen Charman

The most frightening book: Ed Sanders’ nonfiction account of the Manson Family. It was a story I thought I knew. Along with the Altamont Free Concert, when a Hell’s Angel murdered a man in front of the stage where the Rolling Stones was playing, it was the other reason the sixties had ended. That’s what people said. If a decade can be said to end neatly.

I read The Family in someone’s apartment in Amsterdam. I was alone, and the streetlamps produced odd shapes and shadows on the walls surrounding me. Charlie Manson was the Family’s cult leader, followed by a group of young women who did whatever he asked. They carried out his bloody wishes.

I was reading along, fascinated, reading as if it had never happened. Then, and I forgot when or why, it became real. Actual human beings believed what they did, and did what they did. I got scared. In my body. I imagined assassins coming for me. I closed the book. And never finished it. But later I wrote Leslie Van Houten, one of Manson’s girls, into my novel American Genius, A Comedy. She was in prison, my protagonist in another kind of institution. Now a middle aged woman who had earned her BA inside, who taught other prisoners, was doing good deeds, didn’t make trouble, Van Houten failed every parole hearing, her monstrousness never forgiven. Until recently, when, at 78, she gained her freedom. Into what I still wonder.

Lynne Tillman 

In my adult life, I don’t often read traditionally “scary” books, in the sense of something that might fit into the horror or thriller genre. But one book I distinctly remember producing both literal and existential fear is The Secret History by Donna Tartt. My mom gave it to me during the latter half of high school and told me, rather matter-of-factly, that it had been one of her favourite books for many years and she was very excited for me to read it.

I do remember being totally engrossed by it, and I did genuinely let myself get a bit spooked by the bacchanal-murder-plot in the otherwise seemingly idyllic haven-of-higher-learning vibe. But I also remember the complicated and confusing emotions that washed over me while I read it – of closeness and melancholy, fear and paranoia, titillation and timidity – as a result of knowing that not only did my mom apparently absolutely love it, but that she really wanted me to read it at this time in my life. It felt like one of the pivotal experiences of reading itself as “coming of age” as I began to grasp that my mom was a totally separate, independent, and ultimately unknowable person (give me a break, I was a teen!) and that I was, and would become even more so, the same to her. I was paranoid and also enticed by the idea that she might have been trying to communicate something to me about her relationship to queerness, sexuality and identity, and more specifically to her potential knowledge of my queerness, or perhaps even scarier, she wasn’t thinking that at all. I felt daunted and exhilarated and confused and grateful that the adult life I was starting was almost guaranteed to go un-according to plan, which made me both unique and entirely like everyone else.

Gray Wielebinski

I’m not a big reader of fiction, but when I do, it’s almost always horror, science fiction or fantasy. However, when I think of things that have really frightened me, they’re often about the ways that we humans behave towards each other, and sometimes ourselves. I’m particularly interested in the way that our beliefs, however strange or misguided, can direct and govern our behaviour. Religion is, of course, a source of endless horror stories, but in this particular instance, it’s a combination of religious mania and the vagaries of memory – and the ways that memories can be manipulated – that provides the horror.

In his 1995 book Remembering Satan, journalist Lawrence Wright documents how rumours of a Satanic cult overwhelmed the town of Olympia, Washington, in the late 1980s, as a larger Satanic panic, driven by Christian fundamentalist groups, swept America and its media. Wright’s book tells the story of Sheriff Paul Ingram, whose daughters accused him and other town leaders – the judiciary, police, school teachers – of sexually abusing them and killing other children during group Satanic rituals. That there was no evidence to support this and that Sheriff Ingram himself remembered none of it didn’t matter to him. Refusing to accept that his daughters might be fantasising or lying, he pleaded guilty to the charges and served out a 20-year jail sentence. Religious mania, mass delusion, manipulative deception, misplaced faith, and total self-destruction driven by self-doubt: all of these things are far more terrifying than any Satanic cult could ever be. .

Mark Pilkington