Five Great Books from the Borderlands of Mystery, Horror, and the Psychological Thriller

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There’s a region touching on three areas of fiction that I like to explore when writing. It’s the region where mystery story meets horror story meets psychological thriller. You can play with a lot of ambiguity in this zone. Does an odd and creepy situation connected to a crime have a rational explanation, or will the final revelation involve the supernatural? If the narrative is told in the first person, how reliable is the narrator? How much of what we are told is supposed to be real and how much has been distorted, if not outright imagined, by this central character? My new novel, The Screaming Child, is a first-person tale told by a woman trying to go on with her life after her 12-year-old son has vanished. Perhaps he was abducted, perhaps murdered. When she moves out of the city to a rural location to make an effort at recovery, she hears what she thinks are her child’s screams coming from the nearby forest. Her explorations begin, leading her toward a certain discovery. That is, of course, if we can trust what she is telling us…

Here are some books that influenced The Screaming Child, works that all to one degree or another straddle the area where mystery, horror, and psychological distress meet.

Master of the Day of Judgment by Leo Perutz (1921)

It’s Vienna, 1909, and on a September night, a narrator named Baron von Yosch is invited to the house of famous actor Eugene Bischoff. The gathering starts well, with several guests in attendance, but it ends tragically when Bischoff, alone for a moment in his garden pavilion, shoots himself. It appears that his death is a suicide, but some there suspect the Baron drove Bischoff to it somehow. Bischoff’s wife was once the Baron’s lover, and before Bischoff died, the guests rushed to the garden and saw Bischoff give the Baron a hate-filled look. Some there even think the Baron murdered Bischoff. Not pleased to be under a cloud of suspicion, the Baron decides to investigate why Bischoff took his own life, and soon enough he is wondering whether two cases of suicide that Bischoff talked about just before he shot himself are linked to his death. There is also the question of a phone conversation the Baron has at Bischoff’s house after the suicide. The Baron picks up the phone when it rings, and his puzzling talk with a woman on the line ends with her bringing up “the Day of Judgment”. What is she talking about, especially in light of the fact that the last words ever spoken by Bischoff, as he lay dying, were “the Day of Judgment”?

Leo Perutz’s novel blends the bizarre with Agatha Christie-like plotting. It charts a series of mysterious deaths – apparent suicides – and throughout it has a macabre atmosphere. Dread and suspense continually build, and the search for an explanation leads in a direction that no one involved in the deadly events could have foreseen. The solution to the series of locked room deaths is ingenious, and more on the rational side than not, but a final postscript muddies the waters in a fascinating way and leaves the reader wondering what precisely did happen. And were otherworldly forces, decidedly beyond the merely natural, in any way responsible? 

Leo Perutz is a writer who had a successful literary career but who is all too little known today. Still, people as different as Graham Greene, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ian Fleming expressed admiration for his work. Jorge Luis Borges listed Master of the Day of Judgment among his favorite mysteries, while the horror writer and anthologist Karl Edward Wagner put this work on his 13 Best Non-Supernatural Horror novels list. There you have it. Borges saw Perutz’s book as belonging to one genre, Wagner to another – an indication of how the book straddles genre lines.  And though the story, as I said, does have a detailed explanation at its climax, that explanation does not provide any feeling of comfort. Into a world of order comes fear and disruption, but at the conclusion, is any sense of order restored? As the Kirkus review for a 1994 reissue of the book said, “The identity of the Master provides a solution that, like that of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, is more disturbing than the mystery itself.”  

The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat (1936)

“In life there are wounds that, like leprosy, silently scrape at and consume the soul, in solitude…”

So begins the novel considered among the greatest in 20th century Iranian fiction. The narrator is an utterly isolated soul, who tells us that he “came to this understanding that there existed a dreadful chasm between myself and others”. Despite his alienation, he feels an intense desire to recount his story. He wants to write his story if “only to introduce myself to my shadow – a bent shadow on the wall, and it is as if the more I write, it devours it with an even greater appetite – It is for him that I wish to carry out an experiment: to see if we can come to know each other better – because from the time that I cut myself off from others, I have wanted to know myself better.” 

With the mention of his shadow, the psychic division within himself, the motifs of doubling and repetition are established, and the nameless narrator then embarks on a tale replete with mirrors, reflections, and twins. There are dead bodies that appear alive and live people who look dead. Raised by an aunt, the narrator as a baby shares a wetnurse with his aunt’s daughter, and when he gets older, he marries his cousin because she looks like her mother, the aunt he loved. But did he ever truly love his wife? He describes how she carries on frequent affairs and won’t let him touch her, but should we be surprised? We get intimations he may have forced himself on her to make her family accept a wedding between them. Over and over he says he hates her, but he alternates these outbursts with descriptions of the times he has endured humiliation in his displays of love for her. His jealousy and sexual frustration are obvious, but is what he says about her accurate? Did he, at some point in his past, stab her to death, whereupon all his hair turned white? And what about the entrancing woman he once met, whose loss he mourns. She provided a ray of hope for him in his wretched existence, but when she came uninvited to his room and lay down in his bed, he found after touching her that she’d turned cold, a sudden corpse.

I think you get the picture. Sadegh Hedayat’s narrator is a tormented and perverse human being. His obsession with death and ever spiraling paranoia, to say nothing of his liking for wine and opium, bring to mind Edgar Allan Poe’s narrators. Hedayat read and admired Poe, and when his narrator says that the shadow he is writing for resembles an owl, a pitiless owl, you cannot help but think of Poe’s tormenting raven in the poem. The owl may represent wisdom in the West, but in Iran it has often been associated with bad omens.

Born in 1903, Sadegh Hedayat committed suicide in 1951 while in France. His birthplace was Tehran, and he spent time in India. The Blind Owl is set in Iran and India, but this is one of those novels whose terrain is overwhelmingly psychological. While part one recounts what seems to have been an upsetting vision the narrator had, part two explains, at least in part, where the narrator’s obsessions come from. But you are inside his mind the whole time, and dream and memory, hallucination and reality, past and present, all ooze into one another. Images and motifs recur in different forms, giving everything a nightmarish quality. Two gaunt, black horses keep showing up with hollow coughs, and people everywhere have grating laughs to set a person’s hair on end. Blue morning glories get damaged, dried blood won’t wash off human bodies, old men have no eyelids, and lips that are kissed – it doesn’t matter whose – taste like the “stub-end of a cucumber”.

This is a delirious book with a most unreliable narrator, pitch-black and scary, a howl from the heart, but if you like darkness in your novels, it’s irresistible.

Don’t Look Now by Daphne du Maurier (1971)

Parents who have recently lost a young daughter, a blind clairvoyant, Venice as a place of both beauty and foreboding, a series of murders committed in the city’s twisting alleyways – this novella fuses mystery and the occult and psychological unease beautifully. It’s also a probing look at a marriage and how a husband and wife who love each other struggle in their different ways with the worst kind of grief a parent can have. While Laura, the wife, responds positively to the clairvoyant’s claim that she saw their dead daughter’s spirit sitting between her parents at a café table, John rejects all notions of ghosts, benign or otherwise. Without saying so outright, he views his wife’s acceptance of such things as magical thinking. Laura is open to what you might call supernatural phenomena, John closed, but as Du Maurier’s story progresses, it seems as if the one who may have second sight is John. He sees things he can’t explain, but since he doesn’t understand the ability he has, he gets confused. “My eyes deceived me,” he says, when tying to explain to the police why he told them something inaccurate. And his eyes will continue to fool him. Mourning produces unusual mindsets, but a committed rationalist like John doesn’t trust the perceptions that are new to him, apparently unlocked by his daughter’s death. It’s this misperception that leads him to his final doom, making him think he can rescue a child when in fact he’s pursuing a malevolent adult.

In her short stories particularly, Daphne du Maurier excelled at producing horror-tinged fiction. She’s adept at creating and holding tension, and as author Patrick McGrath writes, she often demands that readers “devise for ourselves explanations for the uncanny events she describes.” We share the sense of disorientation her characters feel, and in Don’t Look Now, like John, we realize only at the very end what exactly has been unfolding and the meaning of the odd vision he had.

Du Maurier, by the way, liked and approved of Nicholas Roeg’s film adaptation of her story. Despite a few changes and additions, the film overall is quite faithful to what Du Maurier wrote. Don’t Look Now, the film, is among the greatest horror films of all time, but if you like the movie and haven’t read the story, you should. It’s a gem.

Falling Angel by William Hjortsberg (1978)

The word “uncanny” gets thrown around a lot when people talk about stories that have weird events. A definition of the word I like comes from writer/philosopher/historian Tristan Todorov, who wrote an excellent book on the subject called Introduction a la literature fantastique. Published in English as The Fantastic (1973), the book describes a difference between two types of the fantastic in fiction. Each type has specific characteristics. One, Todorov calls the “uncanny”, but the other he labels “the marvelous”. An “uncanny” story would be one where seemingly remarkable or inexplicable phenomena have a rational explanation by the end.  The reader may think the supernatural is in play in the story, but it’s really not. Conan Doyle’s glowing hound stalking the moors is not, finally, a hound from hell but a dog covered partly in phosphorus. Master of the Day of Judgment, though it has ambiguity, leans in the direction of the “uncanny”, too. By contrast, the “marvelous” resolves unexplainable phenomena with some degree of the non-rational or supernatural, as in, let’s say, Rosemary’s Baby. A prime example of the “marvelous” intruding, so to speak, into a mystery novel is William Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel, which wonderfully fuses a Raymond Chandler-style hardboiled tale about a private eye on a case with an all-out horror component involving voodoo, black magic, and the devil. The book is structured in such a way that final proof of supernatural manipulation is not revealed until the denouement, but clues about what is actually going on have been planted all along. The reader looking for a classic mystery solution will be disappointed or say “not fair”, but if a reader accepts the book’s premise that the devil was in on things from the start, then everything in the narrative hangs together. The book is airtight. What seemed to be proceeding according to the rules of one genre winds up adhering to the operating procedure of another genre.

It’s striking how, through the use of the supernatural, Hjortsberg ties his novel to the original detective story, Oedipus Rex. His private eye, Harry Angel, undertakes an investigation that serves as a quest to understand himself. He’s no king, just a low rent PI working for The Crossroads Detective Agency, but like Oedipus Rex, who sealed his fate at a crossroads, Harry’s search leads to a devastating revelation. Investigator and criminal turn out to be one and the same. What the Greeks ascribed to Fate, Hjortsberg depicts as the devil. With Fate, you can make no deals. With the devil, you should never make a deal because once you do, you can’t get out of it. And if either of them has it in for you, Fate or the devil, you’re destroyed.

Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin (2014)

The Spanish title of this novel is Distancia de rescate, which literally means “rescue distance”. This is something that Amanda, the mother of a young daughter named Nina, constantly broods over. It has to do with the ever-present distance a mother is aware of in relation to her child and the possible dangers that could strike her child. How quickly could the mother cover that distance to her child if danger struck? And if she could cover it fast, would that change anything? Would she be able to “save” her child from danger? If this sounds like the thinking of a dangerously overprotective parent, it’s not; the world Schweblin’s characters inhabit is rife with hazards, especially of the environmental kind. 

The book takes place in rural Argentina, where pesticide-heavy farming has gone on, and what becomes clear is that children in the region have been poisoned, and forever altered, by toxins they ingested from a stream. There’s more, including a supernatural element that might involve the transference of souls, but this is a novel where the less said about the plot, the better. Though it’s a horror story, with much mystery and many surprises, the book above all conveys shifting emotional and psychological states, and it does so without using the conventional rules of horror or mystery fiction. As Jia Tolentino says perfectly in a New Yorker piece, the “genius of Fever Dream is less in what it says than in how Schweblin says it, with a design at once so enigmatic and so disciplined that the book feels as if it belongs to a new literary genre altogether.”

It’s a dialogue-driven novel, but the voices filling it come from the void. They are ghostly and haunted but eerily calm and spare. As you turn the pages, you feel increasing apprehension, and Schweblin offers no respite from the dread because this is a 180 or so page novel that has not a single pause or chapter break. Nightmares don’t come in discrete sections to give a person sleeping restful intermissions, and neither does this book.

One last comment about Fever Dream: in an interview with Schweblin I read, she expresses an enthusiasm for novellas, a love I share. She says that novellas “are so intense and accurate and precise. I have the feeling that if you write a novella, your main wish is that the reader is going to read it in the two or three hours it would take, without even going to the kitchen to get a glass of water.” I didn’t get up for a glass of water, or anything else, when I read Fever Dream, finishing it in one three-hour sitting, and I think she’s dead-on about short books and what, ideally, you’re trying to accomplish when you write one.

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Featured image: Harry Clarke, Poe illustrations

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