The best books about malevolent beasts

It probably goes without saying that King is the master of horror. So often what he does so well is conjuring supernatural baddies (The Mist, Salem’s Lot, Pet Sematary, The Stand, etc., etc., etc.) or showing the consequences of ungodly powers (Firestarter, Dead Zone, Carrie, etc., etc., etc.).

Cujo stands out for taking an absolute valid, absolutely realistic fear—because yes, in real life, in certain situations, dogs are scary as hell—and pushing it to the absolute limit. 

Moby-Dick is one of those dusty old classics that we feel like we’re supposed to read that when you actually read it turns out to be genuinely goddamn fun.

The book is about—well, it’s about so many goddamn things, including melancholy, the American dream, and the history of whaling—but also it’s about the relationship between one dude and one whale, and the dude is obsessed with the whale and thinks the whale is his enemy, but the whale….well, the whale is a whale.

Is the whale really Ahab’s enemy, or is he more like Don Draper in that classic scene from where he goes, “I don’t think about you at all?” Brutal. 

Jaws is one of those extremely rare cases where the movie is actually better. (Can’t think of another one? Try The Godfather.)
It’s a perfectly fun suspense novel, but in the film version Spielberg conjures up by special effects magic (and the magic of Dreyfuss and Scheider’s performances) what Benchley in his novel comes close to but never quite lands: the absolutely terrifying feelings of knowing something is there—and getting closer—and closer—but you can’t actually see. 

When we think of scary animals we think of gnashing teeth and tearing claws, but obviously Orwell’s famous parable presents a very different kind of malevolence: that of overweaning ambition and our deep-seated instinct to control.

The pigs that present themselves as heroes and then slowly, greedily, inexorable turn into murderous dictators, forcing the other animals to do their bidding and then slaughtering them when they become too old, are of course not really pig-like at all—they are human-like, and therefore all the more terrifying. 

Wells is one of the great early masters of science fiction, creator of The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, but with Moreau he was also one of the masters of what David Cronenberg fans know as body horror—the gross, startling, and menacing intermingling of the human body with exterior elements.

In this case, pumas, pigs, you name it. With characters like Ape-Man and Sloth-Man, there is a definitely campiness here, but never enough to distract from the fact that it’s deeply, resonantly disturbing.