Who needs fictional horror when the real thing is outside your door? While ghouls and goblins may make us shiver, the world has all kinds of dark corners that are even more horrifying than the Conjuring movies—and in much more hands-on ways. When serial killers live in the house next door, plagues are stronger than ever, climate disaster looms on the horizon, and the institutions we thought we could trust are exposed to be lying, or even plotting against us, the horror is very much coming from inside the house.
So dip your toes into the terrors of nonfiction. Read these books, and you won’t be able to look at the world quite the same way. Read about a serial killer who lived calmly in Alaska, planning perfect crimes; about innocent men facing the death penalty and the wildfires and floods that will follow a warmer earth; about the violence humans can inflict on one another, and the general precarity of our everyday lives. After all, why bother diving into a new world when this one is scary enough?
The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future by David Wallace-Wells
The kids aren’t all right, and can you blame them? Summers are hotter, storms are stronger, and disasters more deadly than ever. Inspired by his article for New York magazine, Wallace-Wells explores the worst-case scenarios we risk facing if we don’t make a lot of change, fast: from unbreathable air to dying oceans to plagues caused by warming temperatures. It is sobering and shiver-inducing material that looks at the true potential consequences of climate disaster.
American Predator: The Hunt for the Most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21st Century by Maureen Callahan
I can handle horror, but I can’t handle true crime. The unsolved mysteries swirl in my head and give me palpable anxiety. And so will the story of Israel Keyes, a murderer who the FBI considered “unprecedented.” Not only was he active and uncaught for more than a decade, he was living quietly with his daughter that whole time. His ability to blend in, avoid law enforcement, and commit his crimes with meticulous planning and care, will terrify all readers who dig into Callahan’s research on the man.
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson
Many people find comfort in the existence of the criminal justice system, particularly if its machinations have never affected them personally. But what happens when that system is proven to be intensely and possibly irrevocably flawed? If people can be framed, falsely accused, given the death penalty, and denied fair judgment at every turn, is there anything to feel good about at all? It’s a terrifying prospect, and a very real one, which Stevenson lays out in vivid color, exposing the prejudices that drive and the violence that undergirds our legal system.
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There Is No Place For Us: Working and Homeless in America by Brian Goldstone
The American myth is that hard work and dedication mean success, and failure means you didn’t grind hard enough. Many of us assume that an unhoused person on the local corner is unemployed, that something went wrong, that somehow, they messed something up. Gladstone, however, follows the lives of five Atlanta people who have found themselves and their families homeless. All five have jobs, all five are working hard, and all five are struggling to keep a roof over their heads.
Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet A. Washington
The old adage says that you’re not paranoid if they really are out to get you. The Black community at large has a suspicion of medical institutions. They’re right to. In this book, countless lies and conspiracies unfold: infectious mosquitoes are unleashed into a poor community, cells from a tumor are stolen, people are sterilized without permission, cures are withheld. And all is denied. It’s terrifying what the US government and healthcare industry have been allowed to get away with, and what they may still be trying to do.
Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come by Richard Preston
Journalist Preston writes about the horrifying outbreak of ebola in 2013–14, giving not only the terror-inducing drama of the speedy spread and global fears, but also looks into the future, as Preston considers the high possibility of other such outbreaks. Almost as awful as the disease itself is the way that human failures, particularly from global organizations refusing to take the outbreak seriously, delayed appropriate measures from being taken.
First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers by Loung Ung
Perhaps the most horrifying thing of all is when humans commit atrocities against each other. When the Khmer Rouge army took over Cambodia in 1975, a genocide ensued, through violence, labor camps, and starvation. Ung shares her own memories of her family, from their fear and anxiety to the death and suffering that followed the initial explosion of their lives. It is both a horrifying story and a necessary one, and an emotional story of surviving the unsurvivable.
Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore
Every day, countless workers across the United States encounter lethal and potentially harmful chemicals and materials, many of which we may not yet know the full implications or impact of, and others that business owners do know are harmful, but make their workers deal with anyway. That’s famously demonstrated by the case of the Radium Girls: hundreds of women who licked their paintbrushes as they worked on detailed machinery, who later found out the radium they used was poisoning them.
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