The best books that will haunt you for life

Very few books have left such a searing image in my mind as Iain Banks did with one particular scene in his disturbing novel, The Wasp Factory.

The story is told first-person through an increasingly unreliable narrator who lets us in on his private rituals, unsettling relationship with his father, and anxieties about his escaped mental patient brother.

This is a novel that takes its time easing you into the narrator’s world, and by the time you reach the climax, the culminating effect of budding dread and pure shock is enough to haunt anyone for a lifetime.

I first read The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien when I taught tenth-grade English. It was a staple of the curriculum, and I had to master it quickly.

I easily recognized its literary merit with O’Brien’s poetic prose, structural artistry, and philosophical approach to the nature of war. This is not a horror story; it is a war story, and as O’Brien would say, it’s one with no moral.

O’Brien is a real Vietnam veteran, and he uses himself as the narrator in this novel that’s structured as a faux memoir. The truly disturbing scenes depict how desensitized to violence and devoid of humanity the characters become. This one nestles in your psyche with its unanswered questions that it imposes, dropping you in the middle of an existential war.

It’s scary enough to read a story from the third-person point-of-view in which the protagonist gets kidnapped. You feel like a voyeur witnessing something perverse.

In John Fowles’ classic novel, we are subjected to a kidnapping and abduction through the eyes of the kidnapper and his victim. It’s traumatizing to read the section of the story from the victim’s perspective, but it’s downright haunting when the same tale is told through the lens of the villain.

Why? Because Fowles so expertly crafts a realistic psychopath in the character of Frederick, one we can relate to and even sympathize with at times. If you survive the tragic, final pages, a tiny piece of your soul will forever be altered. 

In our continuing trend of books with first-person narration making the list, The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson is by far the most brutal and unapologetic.

The narrator in this 1950s crime thriller is a sadistic deputy sheriff in a small Texas town who finds it easier to live out his darkest fantasies with each vile act he commits. Think American Psycho meets The Andy Griffith Show.

What’s so haunting is that we are again inside the head of a psychopath, watching him justify his actions and maybe, just maybe, convince us that he’s not such a bad guy after all. Once you read this book, you’ll question every charming police officer who taps on your window, wondering what he or she is hiding beneath that smile.

House of Leaves is understandably a divisive book. Some horror fans swear by it; others can’t make it through the first ten pages. And then there are those who don’t claim it’s horror at all. All points are valid and ultimately meaningless.

The central conceit of the story is that a family discovers that their house’s physical measurements are bigger on the inside than they are on the outside. This being a physical impossibility, they enlist help as the house evolves. Danielewski plays with space in a metaphysical sense. Empty voids exist in the dark cracks of our physical world.

This book haunts me to the point that I can’t look at the black holes in my shower drain without having an existential crisis.