Ten very scary books

Emily Temple is the author of The Lightness and the Managing Editor at Literary Hub. She earned her MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia, where she was the recipient of a Henfield Prize.

[My Book, The Movie: The Lightness; The Page 69 Test: The Lightness]

At Lit Hub she and her fellow editors tagged ten books that scared them. Temple's pick:

Susanna Moore, In the Cut

I do not enjoy horror. Look, life is hard enough—why would I go out of my way to have more negative feelings? I know some people find it cathartic, but I just find it unpleasant. When we were in college, my best friend convinced me to go see a movie because it was a “cool indie comedy” and it turned out to be Hard Candy, in which a pedophile and a teenager meet and one of them tortures and humiliates the other in a way that is kind of brilliant in retrospect but also deeply awful and disturbing to watch.

I tease her about it all the time, but I still fell for it when she recommended that I read Susanna Moore’s “cool feminist thriller” In the Cut, which turned out to be a terrifying, upsetting, gut-punch of a book with a devastating ending that I will not give away. In fact, if you haven’t read it, I don’t want to say anything else about it, except that you should only attempt if you have a stronger stomach than I. No doubt the novel is a triumphant work of art, and indeed a cool feminist thriller, but it is one that haunts my dreams. In a bad way. Leave me alone, Bri!

Read about another entry on the list.

In the Cut is among Nicholas Royle's top ten lighthouses in fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue