Christopher Yusko spends his days working as a librarian somewhere in the frozen wastes of Canada, where he lives with his wife, his two daughters, and a cat named Dave Waller. His short fiction appears in Paramnesia: A Grendel Press Horror Anthology, Aurealis and Speculative City.

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Five Books for the Season

The warmth of summer recedes, pulling back like the ocean tide. Soon there will be a chill in the air. That rasp in your throat—endless wildfire smoke, or the fall’s first illness? Hard to say. Either way, you want the comfort of a blanket, mulled cider and brandy, cinnamon and warm apple pie.

You want horror! Something to send shivers down your spine even as you pull that blanket tight. But Christopher Yusko has only published so much.

Put down that knife, set aside those zip ties. No need to chain him to your rattling basement radiator with only spiders and centipedes and your old Windows 98 laptop for company. Here are five of his favourite horror books of the last 10 years to tide you over until his next project.

The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward

Ted Bannerman is a serial killer. Or maybe he’s just a lonely soul who lives alone with his cat Olivia in a boarded up house at the end of a cul-de-sac. Either way, Dee is convinced Ted knows about her kid sister’s disappearance many years ago. She’s finally tracked him down, and she’s moving into the house next door.  But nothing in Ward’s stunningly-written breakthrough is what it seems to be.

The Last House on Needless Street is a complete novel and an instant classic, the kind of literary horror that made Shirley Jackson an enduring figure.  It’s the book I’d recommend to anyone looking to dip a toe into the genre. Even so, don’t expect soft edges here: this one’s a sledgehammer in terms of its emotional impact.

Tender is the Flesh by Augustina Bazterrica

“For a book about some truly awful things, that one had a lot of heart.” That’s what a bookstore clerk told me when I went to get my copy.

A book about consumption in every possible way (‘I have always believed that in our capitalist, consumerist society, we devour each other,’ says the author) Bazterrica’s novel depicts a society where eating human (‘Special’) meat has become normalized after a virus turns animals poisonous. Marcos, who works in a processing plant, tries to hang on to a shred of humanity while being complicit in the process.

Tender Is the Flesh treats triggers like a recipe list, so I’m fascinated by how much Booktok has factored into its success, at least in translation.  So many people who aren’t regular horror readers have proselytized for the novel. Transgression and horror go hand in hand, so perhaps the lesson is that it matters how a thing is presented rather than the thing itself.

Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth 

Ottessa Moshfegh’s influence can be seen all over contemporary fiction, inspiring women to push the boundaries of the grotesque. I’m there for it every time.

After years of manipulation and psychological abuse, Ralph’s narcissistic mother, Laura, has convinced her son to move back home to take care of her. Abby, who has family trauma of her own, reluctantly supports her husband’s decision. Now that Laura has ended her own life in spectacular violence, Ralph can’t move on, and Abby takes it upon herself to heal him by becoming the perfect wife, even as she comes to suspect that her mother-law is haunting the couple.

Hogarth’s breakthrough novel is a slow burn journey into madness, as her protagonist’s domestic ambitions spiral towards a shocking payoff. The book has the blackest sense of humour, and it will hold a lot of appeal to anyone who enjoys unreliable narrators.

I’d give Hogarth bonus points for being a local author, but she really doesn’t need them.

Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

A retail worker battles a zombie-like consumer horde on Black Friday. A young black man tries to believe that his job getting gunned down by trigger happy white patrons at a theme park called Zimmer Land (yes, named after George Zimmerman) will lead patrons to ‘learn about themselves in curated heightened situations’.  A young woman works out her rage on a neighbourhood after being trapped in a nightmarish time loop.   

The stories in this debut collection blend horror, science fiction, surrealism and satire in its examination of race, capitalism and violence. Adjei-Brenyah writes in sharply defined prose that is bold and darkly funny. He’s already followed up the collection with his debut novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars, which was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award. Get in early: this guy’s going to be a giant.

Negative Space by B. R. Yeager

If, as a teenager, you’d ever had that sense that everything is fucked up and nothing’s going to be okay (and maybe you even took a strange kind of comfort from it) this might be the novel for you.  Evoking the underlying nihilism of Thomas Ligotti and Kathe Koja, or maybe Burroughs or Pynchon filtered through the early films of Harmony Korine, the novel follows 4 teens who experiment with a hallucinogen called WHORL during senior year, which allows them to see the dead in a town haunted by suicides.Like any proper hallucinogenic trip, don’t expect any of this to make perfect sense. If you can ride it out, you’re in for a treat (again, assuming any of this sounded like your idea of a treat in the first place). Negative Space is destined for cult status.