Whether it be the language or the imagination, words hold an untold amount of potential when it comes to plunging into the distorted realities of the mind. A turn-of-phrase or a well-seated metaphor can build so effectively it becomes a window into the complexities of the human psyche.
In timeless literary classics like The Picture of Dorian Gray, a painted portrait of a beautiful young man warps and becomes as evil as his soul after he sells it in the name of hedonistic indulgence.
In The Yellow Wallpaper, a young woman is confined too a room in her house as a form of bed rest and recovery but through her journal entries readers become exceedingly aware of the complexities of her situation and mental state.
A horror story so well-told can become a venerable gateway into what it feels like when reality starts to bend and buckle, giving way to unreality.
These seven terrifying books unravel as their characters descend to the depths of insanity—and beyond.
The Winslow Incident
This one hits close given the state of our post-pandemic world. The Winslow Incident tells the story of a town called Winslow in Washington state that resembles any cheery and lazy town people visit in the summer for a vacation getaway.
One day a virus hits the town, causing people to become unfamiliar to even themselves. They seemingly go mad from the symptoms, obsessed with their own delusions and downfall. Hazel Winslow sees it all happen around her, and like everyone else, might just go mad with worry itself.
The Winslow Experiment is a tale of madness projected upon society, revealing the fragility of the human mind in the face of unknown viral threat.
The Cipher
Though some of Koja’s wide-ranging catalog could also fit into this list (check out Skin), The Cipher remains a wonderful mind-altering horror tale of madness.
The story goes something like this: Nicholas lives in a nondescript apartment building, living a pretty lackluster life clerking at a video store; that is, until the day when he and his girlfriend Nakota find something impossible in the building’s storage room.
They name it the “Funhole,” quite literally a hole with untold mysteries and power, and yet also a poetic metaphor for something else.
Nicholas and Nakota become obsessed with the Funhole and their curiosity quickly turns to a variety of experiments, a succession of misadventures akin to a spiral staircase straight to the bottommost hell of the human mind.
Uzumaki
Beginning with one of the most recognizable works of author Junji Ito and a touchstone of disturbing horror in the world of manga, Uzumaki is unlike anything you’ll ever read.
The tome tells the story of a small town on the coast of Japan called Kurouzu-cho. Kirie Goshima is a high school student in the town, and alongside her boyfriend Shuichi Saito and other citizens of the town, they become consumed by a strange phenomenon involving spirals.
Seemingly everywhere they look, the spirals exist and become a point of obsession for the townsfolk. The obsession is portrayed in an increasingly disturbing fashion—citizens become ghastly monsters, people turn into snails, and the dead come to life.
Uzumaki is a book that’ll never leave your mind. Its exploration of the spiral as a form of bending reality and madness is utterly unique.
I'm Thinking of Ending Things
Iain Reid’s novel is a masterful work of psychological horror. At once spare and complex, I’m Thinking of Ending Things introduces readers to an unnamed narrator who is on a wintry road trip with her boyfriend.
The destination: her boyfriend’s parents’ house. The goal: To meet the parents. Of course, it’s always going to be anxious and it can never be that simple.
The book opens with the eponymous declaration—I’m thinking of ending things. The statement becomes a launchpad for the psychological madness that unfolds in the pages to follow.
Is the protagonist looking to break up? Is the protagonist suicidal? Or is it something else entirely?
I’m Thinking of Ending Things should be read like one examines their own mind, with care and without preconception.
Who knows what you’ll find on the next page?
The Tenant
A man named Trelkovsky needs to find an apartment and fast; he comes across a room available and bargains his way into becoming its tenant.
Soon after he moves in, he begins experiencing an increasingly daunting array of subtle torture that may very well be enacted by the other tenants in the building.
He finds out that a previous tenant, Simone Choule, had committed suicide in the very same room. His obsession begins to match his own feelings of alienation, the would-be home becoming a cell.
Considered a cult classic by many a horror fan, Roland Topor’s The Tenant is one of the best examples of psychological suffocation by way of a person’s surroundings.
Bird Box: A Novel
Josh Malerman’s groundbreaking novel, Bird Box, takes the fear of psychological anguish and the pressure of a pandemic and blends it into a unique tale.
Across the world, people start to see things, or rather something unexplainable. Though it doesn’t reveal itself, what they see consumes their mind, driving them to madness and suicide.
The horror of not being able to understand the source, it dismantles any concept of safety, and the global society quickly falls apart. Malorie spends her time training two children, both only four years old, to navigate this compromised world.
Malorie and the children are among the few survivors, and though they’ve indeed survived for years, she knows that it’s time to find others.
She wears blindfolds when outside to protect from this unknown menace. They head downriver, facing the onslaught of the unknown, completely blindfolded, left to the whim of their remaining senses.
Death in Her Hands
Death in Her Hands is an ominous novel of solitude, mystery, and madness. Vesta is a 72-year-old widow living a reclusive life in the woods with her pet dog.
On one of her routine walks, she comes across a written note—"Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body."
What is seemingly perhaps just some snippet from a story, someone’s imagination splayed across the page, becomes Vesta’s latest, all-consuming obsession. The message is taken oddly, and Vesta is left scared by the note.
She can’t move past it and begins spending her time trying to solve its mystery. A few sentences spark her imagination so much that she is unable to let go of it.
Death in Her Hands defies a conventional narrative, utilizing a woven blend of mystery and a story within a story to build a complex unreliable narrator who may in fact be facing a distorted reality.
