Six horror novels where the setting itself Is evil

Mary Berman is a Philadelphia-based writer. She earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Mississippi, where she was a Graduate Excellence Fellow, and she also holds a BA in writing seminars from Johns Hopkins University.

Her short works have been published in Cicada, PseudoPod, Fireside Magazine, and elsewhere.

Until Death is Berman's debut novel.

At CrimeReads the author tagged "six horror novels where the place is the problem." One title on the list:

Helen Phillips, The Beautiful Bureaucrat

Does an office building count as a house? This quiet novel about the horrors of capitalism kicks off with, “The person who interviewed her had no face,” and only gets weirder from there. Our protagonist Josephine is, believe it or not, lucky to have landed this creepy job, where she spends entire days entering strange and mysterious strings of numbers into a database, ensconced in a mysterious, nameless building where the keyboards clack eerily and the numbers echo in her head and the walls, slowly, slowly, slowly, begin to seem alive.

I read this novel in one sitting. It’s a perfect horror novel about being a working stiff: nightmarish, dreamlike, but peppered with concrete moments. It’s also totally grounded in the sweetest, truest sense of what it feels like to be human.

Read about another novel on the list.

The Beautiful Bureaucrat is among Josh Riedel's ine novels about losing (and finding) yourself in work and Sophie Stein's nine top books to put your job in perspective.

The Page 69 Test: The Beautiful Bureaucrat.

--Marshal Zeringue