The best books that explore night’s tantalizing and terrifying potential

This horror novel about a haunted IKEA-like store is playful and fun in every way—from its inventive narrative structure to the book’s mimicry of an IKEA catalogue, complete with a store map and advertisements for furniture that become increasingly deranged.

During daylight, Orsk is a regular furniture store in the suburbs of Cleveland, but when several employees attempt to stay overnight to find out why products keep getting damaged, the building’s dark history begins to bleed into the present. This book perfectly captures the uncanny way nighttime makes familiar landscapes, such as stores and schools, seem entirely unfamiliar, a phenomenon that has always fascinated me. 

Night takes on special significance in any werewolf narrative.

In this gorgeous novel, the narrator is descended from a line of werewolves, but is yet to transform himself, despite being past the age it might typically happen. He desperately wants to transform, and each moonlit night offers him the hope that he might feel like less of an outsider within his own family. This surprisingly tender coming-of-age story deftly explores what it means to exist on the fringes of society, and the deep-seeded need to belong.

I’ve always loved books that resist the confines of any one genre, and this book could easily be categorized as a bildungsroman, a work of literary fiction, or a horror novel.

This remarkable YA haunted house novel, about imperialism, intergenerational trauma, and family legacy, creates a strong sense of unease, which builds towards some frightening and grotesque imagery that stayed with me for a long time. Notably, almost all of the horror occurs after dark.

The descriptions of the narrator’s night terrors are visceral and deeply unsettling, and it is through the murky landscape of dreams that one of the ghost chooses to communicate. In the daytime, the narrator is relatively safe. But at night, in the ethereal space between sleep and wakefulness, the ghosts are more real than the living. I also really enjoyed how the narrator’s queerness plays a central role in the story, but doesn’t entirely define her character.

I had to include a vampire story on this list, and there is no better contemporary vampire novel than this Swedish tour de force.

Blackeberg, Sweden, a cookie-cutter suburb of Stockholm, is one of the most memorable settings I have ever encountered in a book. The novel is full of complex, empathetic portraits of Blackeberg’s residents, even its most cruel ones. The friendship between Oskar, a bullied and scared twelve-year-old boy, and Eli, a centuries-old vampire child, is beautifully rendered and unforgettable. 

This stunning, sprawling novel is anchored by the experiences of Thomas Wazhashk, the night watchman at a jewel-bearing factory in rural North Dakota.

It explores the strangeness of working the night shift and living with a semi-nocturnal schedule. The job and his tireless fight against a bill that will further dispossess Native Americans drive Thomas to a state of near-exhaustion.

Some of the most memorable moments in this compassionate and narratively ambitious book were the descriptions of Thomas’s lonely and occasionally revelatory experiences on the night shift, including his encounters with a white owl he finds pecking at the factory windows. I found this novel, like all of Erdrich’s books, to be immersive and enthralling.