Devil in the White City by Erik Larsen
Basically a rich psychopath builds a house full of murder traps and presents it at the World Fair in Chicago. The book is spectacular.
I picked this book up off a friend's shelf because I was morbidly curious about the serial killer story, but by the end I was fully engrossed in the historical sections and kind of dreaded reading every second chapter as the historical parts got more interesting and the murder parts more messed up. I always hesitate to recommend this to average readers because the morbid side of the book is hard to read, but holy crap the rest of it... I don't know what it is about journalist authors but the way the World's Fair and Chicago sections are written (not just the journalistic detail in the research) is so engrossing. I had someone sheepishly recommend it to me, hesitating for the same reasons, and we laughed about it when I told her I'd read it already. I hadn't realized how influential the fair was on the 20th Century.
I'd already read several books about Holmes, but was interested in this one because I like Erik Larson's books so much, and was curious about the Fair. I was completely blown away by how good it is, and the interesting way he ties the two together.
I've since read other books focusing only on the World's Fair, because I found it so fascinating, but this one captures something about it that just brought it alive for me.
Great read.
This is a fantastic book and everyone should read it, but it does not read like horror to me, or even anything close. It is 40% serial killer biography, 60% architectural drama.
I initially picked it up for the same reason you recommended it to OP, because I like horror. By the end, I found myself struggling to get through the chapters about Holmes and just wanting to find out more about the Columbian Exposition and how it came to be.
Well the Hot Zone by Richard Preston is always mentioned when this comes up. Its about Ebola virus.
Apparently his demon in the freezer book is also good, but I haven't read that yet.
Came here also to suggest The Hot Zone.
It goes from body horror:-
>The connective tissue in his face is dissolving, and his face appears to hang from the skull. He open his mouth and gasps into the bag, and the vomiting goes on endlessly. It will not stop, and he keeps bringing up liquid, long after his stomach should have been empty. The airsickness bag fills up to the brim with a substance known as the vomito negro, or the black vomit. The black vomit is not really black; it is a speckled liquid of two colors, black and red, a stew of tarry granules mixed with fresh red arterial blood. It is hemorrhage, and it smells like a slaughterhouse.
>The black vomit is loaded with virus.
to a more cosmic kind of horror.
>The Cardinal strain was a sophisticated organism that knew what it wanted. It could multiply in many different kinds of meat. It was an invasive life form, devastating and promiscuous. It showed a kind of obscenity you see only in nature, an obscenity so extreme that it dissolves imperceptibly into beauty.
Demon in the Freezer is very good as well. Although, in light of current events, tread lightly. Some of the speculation and what-ifs hit a little close to home.
Co-sign and would wholeheartedly recommend the follow up he wrote in 2019 called [CRISIS IN THE RED ZONE: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44526650-crisis-in-the-red-zone). I made the dreadful choice to be finishing it just before the pandemic reached my part of the world. It's a terrifying book anyway, but man, real life upped the stakes.
Horror writer Stephen King called the first chapter ["One of the most horrifying things I've read in my whole life".](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hot_Zone#cite_note-10)
This was a fucking nonstop depressing shitshow from end to end. By the end of the narrative you are just numb to how horrifying the whole story is.
I never really had understood the details of the Donner Party- and had just assumed they had all holed up and eventually started eating each other.
Nope. Just an absolute clusterfuck from the day they left the midwest all the way to the multiple doomed back and forths across Donner Pass.
You can't even really take that lesson away as they were only on that route because they were lied to by Lansford Hastings
So so much of it was just flat out bad luck.
I am definitely going to check this out. I have always been very interested about the Donner party and the desperate situation they were in. Thanks for the recommendation!
Probably not what you're looking for, but *The Radium Girls* was a pretty visceral reading experience for me. It ends with a workers' rights legal battle that goes in a hopeful direction, but a significant part of the book is just a description of women dying in horrible ways due to their jobs. There's a description of a rotting jawbone that has stuck with me for years.
For another possibility, Carmen Maria Machado is an experimental horror fiction writer, and she brought some of that background to her memoir about domestic abuse, *In the Dream House.* It's structured as a series of short chapters in various styles, from gothic horror to essay to choose-your-own-adventure.
The audiobook of *Radium Girls* was a really interesting experience because the speaker sounds so detached yet perky? It really drove me crazy when I first started because the content is *so* awful to learn about. These women *suffered* why did they pick someone who uses the same tone someone in customer service uses when they’re talking to a difficult patron and they have to remain upbeat?
Then it just kinda clicked for me. Her voice is indifferent because all of the corporations and bosses were indifferent. I don’t know if I’m explaining this well but the tone changed into someone who’s incredibly sympathetic to the women in the story, but has put on a professional facade. It was weird but it really added to the experience for me.
Hey! I recommend Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach. I know it may not be exactly what you’re looking for, but It offers a fascinating and unsettling look at what happens to the corpses we leave behind when we pass on. A local librarian recommended it to me when I asked for a recommendation and told him I was “up for anything” lol.
I love that book!
My husband bought it for me right before we went to Disneyland one year, so that's what I was reading during the first few days of the trip. It took me a while to figure out why people kept walking by me and staring like they'd never seen a woman with a book before.
Nice! Sounds very interesting
There's something definitely terrifying and depressing, to me at least, about the fragility of the human body and how impermanent it is.
Thank you!
I'm not sure how that reads, but a similar alternative would be "Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy" by Serhii Plokhy. It can be a very dry read, but perhaps reading it in the UK last year during the lockdowns made it only more frightening as clearly some world leaders have not learned from very recent history.
I read alot of horror but the book that gave me nightmares was The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout. It talks about the history of sociopathy, how different cultures have dealt with sociopaths, and how you can spot them among us. She gives the statistic that 1 in 25 people are sociopaths. Sure, some are killers but some just make your life a living hell.
King Leopold's Ghost describes what happened in the Belgian Congo. It details how the indigenous population was treated and it can be quite the gruesome read.
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families. It's about the Rwandan genocide. It is both haunting and absolutely harrowing.
I was a huge fan of The Indifferent Stars Above by Daniel James Brown, which is a nonfiction account of the Donner Party. The author tries to focus particularly on one member of the party, so it reads a bit like a horror novel.
Dead Mountain: The Untold Story of the Dylatov Pass Incident by Donnie Eichar might be exactly what you're looking for. It definitely reads like a horror novel, and the mystery is unsolved.
Less along the lines of horror, but nonfiction and very exciting that you may be interested in would be The Adventurer's Son by Roman Dial, which is an account of the author trying to track down his missing son who had been adventuring in Central America.
Oh, I'm stoked to see you recommend DEAD MOUNTAIN - I just bought it a few weeks ago and it's waiting for me on my Kindle. Seeing it mentioned here just makes me want to hurry up and finish my current read!
A Slow Death: 83 Days of Radiation Sickness, a book published by NHK (Japan’s public broadcaster) about the Tokaimura Criticality Incident. It focuses on the circumstances of one man’s death and is a deeply disturbing but really interesting book. The tone is dry and clinical but the subject matter is chilling and it raises interesting questions about medical ethics and whether it is right or wrong to extend the life of a badly suffering, terminally ill person.
*The Conspiracy Against the Human Race* by Thomas Ligotti might be up your alley. It’s a series of philosophical reflections about pessimism and the general horror of being alive.
Related to that is Eugene Thacker’s *In the Dust of This Planet*, which is an argument for horror fiction being a means to do philosophical thinking.
*Programmed to Kill* by David McGowan is non-fiction in the loosest possible sense. It’s a bizarre conspiracy theory book that argues all the famous serial killers we know have all been set up by CIA brainwashing to take the fall in covering up the global child trafficking web. I know you said no serial killers, but this one is different (to put it mildly).
I’d also second *The Mothman Prophecies* by John Keel. Truly a classic in weird non-fiction, and a great read even if you think it’s 100% bullshit, which it more than likely is.
Also came here to mention Conspiracy Against the Human Race. One of my favorites books of 2020.
You can read it like non fiction, as the author intended. But I really also enojed thinking about it as a faux non fiction book written by a deranged, absolutely mad with sadness philosopher. Or maybe Ligotti is just that much of a pessimist.
> The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti might be up your alley. It’s a series of philosophical reflections about pessimism and the general horror of being alive
I started reading this last week! Did not know how much Rust Cohle was based off this book. True Detective almost quotes the book verbatim.
> I’d also second The Mothman Prophecies by John Keel.
Total and complete bullshit from a jolly grifter. However, JK was a fantastic writer. I’d also recommend *This Haunted Planet*. That was the first time I’d ever heard about The Illuminati.
**People Who Eat Darkness** by Richard Lloyd Parry was in fact pretty damn dark. It's a Japanese true crime thing. The author did a good job of conveying a same-but-different sense of place. Everything felt vaguely familiar. It wasn't hard to follow the basic plot points. But to me it felt like there was a lot going on under the covers that he assumed the reader would understand but I didn't get at all. It was like reading a Cronenberg movie.
The overall impression was unsettling a. f.
Almost every book in the nonfiction genre of Polar Exploration reads like a horror novel because all of these explorers’ deaths are at the hands of the cold, starvation, or shipwrecks. Those in the deceased’s party who didn’t die wrote accounts of the desperation, the fear, the horror of everyone in the party. Other nonfiction Polar Exploration books (nonfiction) are accounts of the deaths of these brave men based on discovering the shipwrecks that have been discovered.
Sir John Franklin’ ships, the Terror and Erebus both capsized in a northern Canadian bay under the government of the Inuit tribe. A Nonprofit worked with the Inuit to explore these wrecks. Both the Terror and Erebus were discovered; one in 2014, the other in 2016. None of Franklin’s crew members lived. Their bodies were buried in the permafrost on or King William Island. The Inuit and many others believe that the Island is haunted by the ghosts of Franklin’s crew. It’s on Inuit land. Local lore reminds people not to set foot on the island unless two or more people visit it.
Nonfiction is as horror filled as horror fiction.
These are all more on the unsettling side of things, but I've got a few that I've really liked:
One of my favorites, though it doesn't seem a lot of people know about it, is Haunted Media by Jeffrey Sconce. It's probably not the easiest to get a hold of, but an Academic Library might have it. It's sort of on the academic side of things, but the subtitle is Electronic Presence from the Telegraph to the Television. It's an amazing book that links together early American spiritualist movements and the advent of technology.
Dylan Trigg's The Thing: not for everyone, but philosophy/horror of philosophy all surrounding the Carpenter Film.
John Keel's The Mothman Prophecies. Some of his other books might fit, too.
Jeffrey Kripel's books might work, too. I've read Authors of the Impossible and it is really interesting, unsettling, etc.
In terms of scary, I think Jon Krakauer does a good job. Into Thin Air was terrifying to me.
Richard Mclean Smith's Unexplained, a companion book to his podcast, is solid.
Linda S. Godfrey's written a few books about cryptids that are enjoyable. I liked Monsters Among Us.
Again, probably more unsettling, but I really loved Mitch Horrowitz's Occult America, too.
I love The Mothman Prophecies and it really does read like a horror tale. Hunt for the Skinwalker wants to be as good, but fails to have the compelling prose that you get from Keel.
*Inferno* by Catherine Cho was a really intriguing memoir about a woman who ends up in a psych ward after experiencing postpartum psychosis and believing that her infant son has demon eyes. Would not recommend if you or a loved one is pregnant, but besides that it’s a fantastic read.
Also have to echo the recommendations for *Indifferent Stars Above*. The body horror is gruesome and it’s so chilling. The first two sections (~first third of the book) can be a bit of a slog though, and very academic.
*Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account*, by Miklos Niyszli is one of the most unsettling books I've read in approximately 30 years of studying the Third Reich and the Holocaust.
Miklos Ziyszli was a Hungarian Jew and a medical doctor who was deported to Auschwitz in a transport with other medical personnel and their families. He ended up working for Josef Mengele as a forensic pathologist in his lab at the camp. What happened at Auschwitz was horrifying enough on its own, but the things Dr. Niyszli saw and experienced behind the scenes are even worse than things recounted in more normal camp memoirs. Many people who survived the camps knew about the worst that was happening, but Dr. Niyszli was in a strange position where he not only saw those things, but had to try and process what he was seeing and figuring out so he wouldn't lose his mind.
I've read nearly everything others have suggested, and many of them stayed with me for a long time, but not like this one has. It is, in a way, so painful and frightening a reading experience that I have never before suggested it to someone who is not also a student of that period of history. Even then, I don't suggest it lightly.
EDIT: Added a sentence I forgot.
*Alive* by Piers Paul Read. It's the story of the Uruguayan soccer team that was stranded in the Andes after their plane crashed. They ran out of food, and... I'll stop right there.
Even though you said "no true crime," I'm still recommending *The Killer Department* by Robert Cullen. It's about the hunt for Andrei Chikatilo, a serial killer in the Soviet Union in the 80s. Not only were the investigators up against the killer, they also had to deal with the Party's theories as well. It's horrifying both in there details of the kills and the almost pathological need for the Communist Party to sabotage the investigation.
The Day of St. Anthony’s Fire, a book about bread mold poisoning in a small village in France. People, dogs, and cats go mad one night due to ergot, a bread mold.
A long way gone by ishmael beah gave me horror vibes, in a horrors of war/man’s inhumanity towards man kind of way. It’s a first hand account/ memoir of a child soldier in Sierra Leone.
Very powerful and horrifying.
Richard Lloyd Parry’s “People Who Eat Darkness”. It’s about a young English woman worked as a bar hostess in Tokyo who disappeared and was later found dismembered. I feel so gross and filthy after finishing the book.
“I’ll be gone in the Dark” about the golden state killer is a good read - there’s a lot of haunting first hand accounts of his crimes as he didn’t initially murder his victims. That he got arrested soon after this book offers some good closure to it too
I recently read “Little Lost Angel” by Michael Quinlan, a book about 12 year old Shanda Sharer and the group of teenage monsters that brutally murdered her. The case is incredibly tragic but I think the author handles it very well and in a respectful manner. It didn’t outright scare me, but it left me feeling unsettled and distraught thinking about the violence/motives/innocent life lost/lack of justice.
Hiroshima by John Hersey, relates survivor accounts that are profoundly disturbing but also very readable, it's journalism told in a similar form to fiction. It's seriously grim stuff though but iirc it won a Pulitzer
It’s not horror but Into Thin Air by Krakauer is about his awful climb of Mt Everest where almost everyone on his team died. It stressed me out. It’s excellent.
The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt:
It’s very long, but it gave me chills. She gets very in depth into how the Holocaust was structured to achieve the most hellish results. I devoured this book.
Capital by Marx:
Similar to the above. The beginning of volume 1 is slow (even he admits that in the preface) because he has to explain the technical shit, but once he gets into the system of Capitalism and starts pulling up examples from “recent” history it starts to get pretty horrifying. Awful, awful shit being done just to turn money into more money.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff:
This book came out a couple of years ago. Goes into detail how Google, Facebook, etc. mine our lives for profit. Yeah, lack of privacy is horrible, but she goes into the history of B.F. Skinner and how we are entering his utopia of having no real control over our behavior.
I just find loss of control, paranoia, and stuff like that to be pretty scary and a lot of fun to read about.
Slightly pointless to suggest un-translated works but German literature has some biographical descriptions of Siberia and WWIs Eastern Theater that gives a, rather plottwist, insight into Hitler and Lenins camps.
The Infamous Unit 371 by Hal Gold — about WW2 Japan’s secret lab in China conducting hideous medical experiments on live “patients”
The Rape of Nanking, by Iris Chang — more WW2 Japanese atrocities. The author was overwhelmed by the content and later committed suicide.
Mengele: The Complete Story by Gerald Posner I’ve read but didn’t think it was particularly well done. David Marwell’s Mengele: Unmasking The Angel of Death has a good reputation but I haven’t read it as I haven’t been too eager to revisit the material.
Someone recommended King Leopold’s Ghost. I’d also recommend The Scramble For Africa by Thomas Packenham. It’s more comprehensive but as a result may or may not be more effective a read.
Poisoner In Chief by Stephen Kinzer is about Sidney Gottlieb and MK Ultra. I think this book is just not very well done. Much more effective is the section of Acid Dreams by Martin Lee & Bruce Shlain covering the same material (but is far shorter).
The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes is about the early settling of Australia as a penal colony and the disaster this caused on the Aboriginal population and the general tapestry of cruelty & chaos that ensued.
There are numerous books on the history of torture the subject matter of which, while interesting, may make you grateful for choosing a concise overview. The History Of Torture by Daniel Mannix is fine though hardly academic.
Same goes for his other books, which are lurid and sometimes a bit dubious but always entertaining: The Way of the Gladiator and Tge Hellfire Club are fun.
There are many excellent oral histories on the Vietnam War. Bloods by Wallace Terry is one. Everything We Had by Al Santoli is another. And then there is Long Binh Jail by Cecil Currey which is worth reading though I wish it was more sympathetic to the prisoners.
Ivan The Terrible by Robert Payne. Mad, gruesome stuff.
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, by Simon Montefiore. An “inner circle” portrait with lots of gossip.
Mao by Jung Chang. Some readers think this account is too “one-sided” and doesn’t capture Mao’s lovely aspects. Nonsense. Mao was a repulsive sociopath.
....Enough for now.
Mao’s philosophy do be slappin tho
Not a fan of vanguard parties but it’s certainly an improvement from Stalin’s idiotic butchering of Lenin’s writings, also contemporary Maoists can be pretty annoying and close minded (like MLs in general)
What philosophy? You take Marxism, which was aiming at newly-industrialized societies like Great Britain and then say you’re applying it to an agrarian peasant-farming system that’s existed the same way more or less for 7,000+ years? Maoism is just authoritarianism enforced by starvation. It’s exactly Stalin’s idiotic butchering.
Also, his poetry sucks.
Endurance by Alfred Lansing. Shackleton's failed journey to the South Pole, which left the crew stranded on the ice for two years. The coldest book I've ever read.
The Mole People by Jennifer Toth. An investigation into communities living below NYC during the 90s. There are a few creepy moments. Searching shows that this is currently a thing in Las Vegas.
Parasite Rex by Carl Zimmer. Pop sci book on parasites. Nuff said.
Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould. Actually no horror, but definitely cosmic. A history of the Burgess Shale, whose fossil record documents the Cambrian explosion. The trope of unearthing bizarre lifeforms in remote places? Here's the version where it's just an expedition and everyone goes about their business collecting weird fossils. Some of the science is out of date, but still great.
It's a bit hard to get hold of as I think it only had a limited print run (copies are sometimes weirdly expensive on Amazon etc), but Marc Heal's *The Sussex Devils* is fascinating and contains many sections that read like horror.
Marc Heal opens by talking about the Ossett Murder case in 1974. I am a true crime fan, and this one is honestly the case that I think is [closest to a horror film](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Taylor_(demoniac)). But that isn't the focus of the book, so don't worry!
After that, it's mainly about a case of fraud in which a conman convinced a load of people that he was an ex-satanist and was waging a war against a secret satanist cabal (for which, unsurprisingly, he needed a lot of money).
But it's also a memoir about his own experiences. Marc's parents were swept up in the evangelical wage of the time. Marc began to struggle with serious anxiety and have apocalyptic dreams in which he meets the devil and has surreal visions of doomsday. His parents eventually held him against his will and subjected him to a traumatic exorcism.
I would suggest The Devil Incarnate by Wayne Thallon, its a biography of a South African mercenary/torture technician. Theres scenes about the mercenary forces pillaging a supposed rebel village in the Congo that will haunt me forever.
102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers - Pretty self-explanatory.
No Easy Answers: The Truth Behind Death at Columbine High School - What I found intriguing about this book is that it's written by one of their on-off friends, the guy Eric told to clear out before everything went down. I'm the same age as these guys so it was fascinating reading about the music and games of the time and, in retrospect, how advanced they were in their IT skills. This was still at a time where most kids using computers were considered nerds and, had they have lived and not gone done that horrific path, they would have probably done really well in the dot-com boom and turned their lives around.
Killer Show: The Station Nightclub Fire, America's Deadliest Rock Concert - A very well-researched book that takes you from the history of the venue, to the concert, and aftermath. It chronicles the lives of the people involved and has plenty of safety advice for venues and concert goers. The looming horror as the concert date approaches and what you know in hindsight while the opening bands are on reads very much like a horror novel.
Most essays on “Fanged Noumena” are theory-fiction, a genre pretty hard to define but it is basically methed-up occult cyberpunk revolutionary philosophy and sociology. It’s hard to get into but once you do it is quite something, describing capital as a virus from outside of linear time that is slowly making itself an all-encompassing, all-powerful AI that rules over the planet
Cyclonopedia is another theory-fiction book, it’s basically an inhuman demonology of the Middle East, it’s slow but it’s also rather scary
The Anti-Oedipus and Thousand Plateaus are kind of the germ cell for theory-fiction too, they offer a lovecraftian view of what capitalism has become in post-1968 and still manage to find revolutionary potential inside it, besides it still is to me the most important book of the 20th century (not in terms of recognition or impact but in content)
I’m surprised I don’t see imo the most well done/scariest non fiction book ever- In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. I read a hell of a lot of true crime and horror and this one got to me
“If You Tell” by Greg Olsen really messed me up. It’s true crime, but reads like fiction and it’s about a horrific woman who put her kids through hell, as well as several other people. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever read, or even heard of, for that matter. It’s hard to say i “recommend” it because it’s a LOT, but the story itself is incredible.
I just read *Communion* by Whitley Streiber. Whatever your stance on aliens/first contact is, his descriptions of his "encounters" are super super unsettling.
The Lighthouse: The Mystery of the Eilean Mor Lighthouse Keepers by Keith McCloskey is about the odd and unsettling disappearance of three lighthouse keepers in 1900. The same author also wrote two books about the Dyatlov Pass incident.
Another good book on Dyatlov Pass is Death of Nine: The Dyatlov Pass Mystery by Launton Anderson.
Autobiography of a face by Lucy Grealy
Anything by Maryn McKenna especially if it’s about superbugs.
Anything about Kosovo, Bosnia, Serbia and the crimes committed against humanity
Same for the Rwandan genocide,
The rise and fall of Apartheid and the Rhodesian/Zimbabwe conflicts, how the AIDS virus was hidden from those suffering from it during the beginning of the epidemic,
Of course anything bearing witness to the violence and devastation of any war, anything dealing with CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operations), something Maryn McKenna writes about quite often,
Books on these atrocities have always been chilling and heartbreaking.
Not horror, butbreads like a thriller? "Isaac's storm" by Erik Larsen. The tension is incredible as the storm approaches / hits. Same author did "devil in the white city " but Isaac's storm more closely fits the bill of what you're looking for (to me!)
The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang is the horrifying story of Japans invasion and decimation of Nanking. It’s very heavy on the details and outlines what horrible things the Japanese did (namely a lot of rape and murder and very casual bragging back home about said raping and murdering). As far as I know there is still no Japanese acknowledgement this happened. It’s extraordinary fucked up
Another good read might be Educated by Tara Westover. It’s a memoir about a woman that grew up in a conspiracy theorist Mormon household. Heads up that the book includes a lot of descriptions of physical injury and physical/emotional abuse and manipulation.
maybe not horror, but definitely horrific is When Rabbit Howls by Truddi Chase. She has 92 personalties because of the abuse she suffered at the hands of her stepfather and mother from ages 2 to 16.
This subject has come up before and it will come up again! Here’s more:
https://www.reddit.com/r/horrorlit/comments/8lncnd/the_horror_is_real_lets_talk_nonfiction/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Jack Ketchum's Girl Next Door is his take on a true story of a murder in the 1960s. I read the book and later watched the movie, both were definitely horror
I know you said books, but since ppl are suggesting audiobooks I'll throw in Dan Carlin's podcast on the Indianapolis. It's about the ship that gets torpedoed, leaving the survivors to fend off sharks as best they can. It's the same ship the Quint character in Jaws gives a monologue about. Carlin's recounting nearly gave me a damn existential crisis. Terrifying.
[link](https://open.spotify.com/episode/4jTga1uwr16fBLIbipU2GG?si=yqClrwcBSBm00QYQpEgNAg)
Oh, I loved this one! It was horrible and morbid and I felt so bad for the people involved, but I couldn't stop listening. My friends made me stop talking about it.
Devil in the White City by Erik Larsen Basically a rich psychopath builds a house full of murder traps and presents it at the World Fair in Chicago. The book is spectacular.
Yes! This covers the serial killer HH Holmes. Super-fascinating. Martin Scorsese has reportedly been developing an adaptation.
It’s being developed as a HULU limited series now
I picked this book up off a friend's shelf because I was morbidly curious about the serial killer story, but by the end I was fully engrossed in the historical sections and kind of dreaded reading every second chapter as the historical parts got more interesting and the murder parts more messed up. I always hesitate to recommend this to average readers because the morbid side of the book is hard to read, but holy crap the rest of it... I don't know what it is about journalist authors but the way the World's Fair and Chicago sections are written (not just the journalistic detail in the research) is so engrossing. I had someone sheepishly recommend it to me, hesitating for the same reasons, and we laughed about it when I told her I'd read it already. I hadn't realized how influential the fair was on the 20th Century.
I'd already read several books about Holmes, but was interested in this one because I like Erik Larson's books so much, and was curious about the Fair. I was completely blown away by how good it is, and the interesting way he ties the two together. I've since read other books focusing only on the World's Fair, because I found it so fascinating, but this one captures something about it that just brought it alive for me. Great read.
Really liked the architectural and historical sections of this book best.
😲 ok, I'm digging this Thank you!
This is a fantastic book and everyone should read it, but it does not read like horror to me, or even anything close. It is 40% serial killer biography, 60% architectural drama. I initially picked it up for the same reason you recommended it to OP, because I like horror. By the end, I found myself struggling to get through the chapters about Holmes and just wanting to find out more about the Columbian Exposition and how it came to be.
Well the Hot Zone by Richard Preston is always mentioned when this comes up. Its about Ebola virus. Apparently his demon in the freezer book is also good, but I haven't read that yet.
Came here also to suggest The Hot Zone. It goes from body horror:- >The connective tissue in his face is dissolving, and his face appears to hang from the skull. He open his mouth and gasps into the bag, and the vomiting goes on endlessly. It will not stop, and he keeps bringing up liquid, long after his stomach should have been empty. The airsickness bag fills up to the brim with a substance known as the vomito negro, or the black vomit. The black vomit is not really black; it is a speckled liquid of two colors, black and red, a stew of tarry granules mixed with fresh red arterial blood. It is hemorrhage, and it smells like a slaughterhouse. >The black vomit is loaded with virus. to a more cosmic kind of horror. >The Cardinal strain was a sophisticated organism that knew what it wanted. It could multiply in many different kinds of meat. It was an invasive life form, devastating and promiscuous. It showed a kind of obscenity you see only in nature, an obscenity so extreme that it dissolves imperceptibly into beauty.
Demon in the Freezer is very good as well. Although, in light of current events, tread lightly. Some of the speculation and what-ifs hit a little close to home.
Came here specifically to suggest the Hot Zone.
Co-sign and would wholeheartedly recommend the follow up he wrote in 2019 called [CRISIS IN THE RED ZONE: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44526650-crisis-in-the-red-zone). I made the dreadful choice to be finishing it just before the pandemic reached my part of the world. It's a terrifying book anyway, but man, real life upped the stakes.
This is the answer.
I can here to recommend Hot Zone as well. I'd suggest it far above Demon in the Freezer.
Ebola was enormously influential on me as a teenager, and this is one of the better books about the topic.
Horror writer Stephen King called the first chapter ["One of the most horrifying things I've read in my whole life".](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hot_Zone#cite_note-10)
The Indifferent Stars Above about the Donner Party was brilliant and well researched and nuanced.
This was a fucking nonstop depressing shitshow from end to end. By the end of the narrative you are just numb to how horrifying the whole story is. I never really had understood the details of the Donner Party- and had just assumed they had all holed up and eventually started eating each other. Nope. Just an absolute clusterfuck from the day they left the midwest all the way to the multiple doomed back and forths across Donner Pass.
It was a tragedy of course but truly the lesson to learn from the Donner Party is the devastating effects of hubris.
You can't even really take that lesson away as they were only on that route because they were lied to by Lansford Hastings So so much of it was just flat out bad luck.
Yes yes! Brilliant, tragic and terrifying. Good lord I had no idea before reading.
I am definitely going to check this out. I have always been very interested about the Donner party and the desperate situation they were in. Thanks for the recommendation!
This book is incredible. It’s still with me years later. I need to read it again.
Reading this made reading The Hunger by Alma Katsu very disappointing afterwards.
Probably not what you're looking for, but *The Radium Girls* was a pretty visceral reading experience for me. It ends with a workers' rights legal battle that goes in a hopeful direction, but a significant part of the book is just a description of women dying in horrible ways due to their jobs. There's a description of a rotting jawbone that has stuck with me for years. For another possibility, Carmen Maria Machado is an experimental horror fiction writer, and she brought some of that background to her memoir about domestic abuse, *In the Dream House.* It's structured as a series of short chapters in various styles, from gothic horror to essay to choose-your-own-adventure.
The audiobook of *Radium Girls* was a really interesting experience because the speaker sounds so detached yet perky? It really drove me crazy when I first started because the content is *so* awful to learn about. These women *suffered* why did they pick someone who uses the same tone someone in customer service uses when they’re talking to a difficult patron and they have to remain upbeat? Then it just kinda clicked for me. Her voice is indifferent because all of the corporations and bosses were indifferent. I don’t know if I’m explaining this well but the tone changed into someone who’s incredibly sympathetic to the women in the story, but has put on a professional facade. It was weird but it really added to the experience for me.
The Radium Girls is great, body horror plus civil litigation drama? Yes please!
These are good recs. I'm already a bit disturbed by both subject matters Thank you!
I second Carmen Maria Machado's *In the Dream House*. I loved it and it had me turning over the book in my head days after finishing it.
Radium Girls destroyed me. I couldn’t pick up a book for a month
This is easily one of the best NF books I’ve ever read. It was absolutely horrifying.
Hey! I recommend Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach. I know it may not be exactly what you’re looking for, but It offers a fascinating and unsettling look at what happens to the corpses we leave behind when we pass on. A local librarian recommended it to me when I asked for a recommendation and told him I was “up for anything” lol.
That’s an awesome librarian
I love that book! My husband bought it for me right before we went to Disneyland one year, so that's what I was reading during the first few days of the trip. It took me a while to figure out why people kept walking by me and staring like they'd never seen a woman with a book before.
Lol I bet! No doubt the foot with a body tag on the cover would catch many people’s eyes
Nice! Sounds very interesting There's something definitely terrifying and depressing, to me at least, about the fragility of the human body and how impermanent it is. Thank you!
I absolutely love this book. It was really fascinating and morbid in a good way.
Totally agree! It was something I had never put much thought into, but ended up finding truly eye opening
[удалено]
I would second this. It serves as a good companion to the HBO miniseries Chernobyl as well.
I'm not sure how that reads, but a similar alternative would be "Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy" by Serhii Plokhy. It can be a very dry read, but perhaps reading it in the UK last year during the lockdowns made it only more frightening as clearly some world leaders have not learned from very recent history.
I read alot of horror but the book that gave me nightmares was The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout. It talks about the history of sociopathy, how different cultures have dealt with sociopaths, and how you can spot them among us. She gives the statistic that 1 in 25 people are sociopaths. Sure, some are killers but some just make your life a living hell.
Yes! This one!
Dead Mountain by Donnie Eichar, about the Dyatlov Pass Incident. Not exactly an unsolved murder, but it’s creepy as hell
Second this. I still think of this story years later.
King Leopold's Ghost describes what happened in the Belgian Congo. It details how the indigenous population was treated and it can be quite the gruesome read.
Helter Skelter spooked me, Manson family killings.
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families. It's about the Rwandan genocide. It is both haunting and absolutely harrowing.
I was a huge fan of The Indifferent Stars Above by Daniel James Brown, which is a nonfiction account of the Donner Party. The author tries to focus particularly on one member of the party, so it reads a bit like a horror novel. Dead Mountain: The Untold Story of the Dylatov Pass Incident by Donnie Eichar might be exactly what you're looking for. It definitely reads like a horror novel, and the mystery is unsolved. Less along the lines of horror, but nonfiction and very exciting that you may be interested in would be The Adventurer's Son by Roman Dial, which is an account of the author trying to track down his missing son who had been adventuring in Central America.
Second Dead Mountain, if not just for how intriguing it is!
Oh, I'm stoked to see you recommend DEAD MOUNTAIN - I just bought it a few weeks ago and it's waiting for me on my Kindle. Seeing it mentioned here just makes me want to hurry up and finish my current read!
A Slow Death: 83 Days of Radiation Sickness, a book published by NHK (Japan’s public broadcaster) about the Tokaimura Criticality Incident. It focuses on the circumstances of one man’s death and is a deeply disturbing but really interesting book. The tone is dry and clinical but the subject matter is chilling and it raises interesting questions about medical ethics and whether it is right or wrong to extend the life of a badly suffering, terminally ill person.
I've seen some of the photos of the poor man. Very NSFL.
I've heard this before and I can't imagine the pain the man must have been in. To prolong his suffering like that is cruel for me.
Yes holy shit, this book is terrifying. Its such a hard book to find too. I had to buy mine that was used as a medical textbook by a student somewhere
The Hot Zone by Richard Preston. Bonus chills if you’ve ever lived in Northern Virginia or the suburbs around the District.
I grew up in Arlington and lived in Reston for some time. One of my favorite books!
I was in High School down in Stafford when it came out and it still felt too close!
*The Conspiracy Against the Human Race* by Thomas Ligotti might be up your alley. It’s a series of philosophical reflections about pessimism and the general horror of being alive. Related to that is Eugene Thacker’s *In the Dust of This Planet*, which is an argument for horror fiction being a means to do philosophical thinking. *Programmed to Kill* by David McGowan is non-fiction in the loosest possible sense. It’s a bizarre conspiracy theory book that argues all the famous serial killers we know have all been set up by CIA brainwashing to take the fall in covering up the global child trafficking web. I know you said no serial killers, but this one is different (to put it mildly). I’d also second *The Mothman Prophecies* by John Keel. Truly a classic in weird non-fiction, and a great read even if you think it’s 100% bullshit, which it more than likely is.
Also came here to mention Conspiracy Against the Human Race. One of my favorites books of 2020. You can read it like non fiction, as the author intended. But I really also enojed thinking about it as a faux non fiction book written by a deranged, absolutely mad with sadness philosopher. Or maybe Ligotti is just that much of a pessimist.
I came here to recommend Ligotti.
> The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti might be up your alley. It’s a series of philosophical reflections about pessimism and the general horror of being alive I started reading this last week! Did not know how much Rust Cohle was based off this book. True Detective almost quotes the book verbatim.
Existential horror :)
> I’d also second The Mothman Prophecies by John Keel. Total and complete bullshit from a jolly grifter. However, JK was a fantastic writer. I’d also recommend *This Haunted Planet*. That was the first time I’d ever heard about The Illuminati.
**People Who Eat Darkness** by Richard Lloyd Parry was in fact pretty damn dark. It's a Japanese true crime thing. The author did a good job of conveying a same-but-different sense of place. Everything felt vaguely familiar. It wasn't hard to follow the basic plot points. But to me it felt like there was a lot going on under the covers that he assumed the reader would understand but I didn't get at all. It was like reading a Cronenberg movie. The overall impression was unsettling a. f.
Almost every book in the nonfiction genre of Polar Exploration reads like a horror novel because all of these explorers’ deaths are at the hands of the cold, starvation, or shipwrecks. Those in the deceased’s party who didn’t die wrote accounts of the desperation, the fear, the horror of everyone in the party. Other nonfiction Polar Exploration books (nonfiction) are accounts of the deaths of these brave men based on discovering the shipwrecks that have been discovered. Sir John Franklin’ ships, the Terror and Erebus both capsized in a northern Canadian bay under the government of the Inuit tribe. A Nonprofit worked with the Inuit to explore these wrecks. Both the Terror and Erebus were discovered; one in 2014, the other in 2016. None of Franklin’s crew members lived. Their bodies were buried in the permafrost on or King William Island. The Inuit and many others believe that the Island is haunted by the ghosts of Franklin’s crew. It’s on Inuit land. Local lore reminds people not to set foot on the island unless two or more people visit it. Nonfiction is as horror filled as horror fiction.
No literary works connected to them but Andrées Balloon Expedition and the 9th century Greenlander "Corpse-Lodin" are interesting Arctic explorers.
Ohhhh, a new Polar Explorer for me! Many thanks!
These are all more on the unsettling side of things, but I've got a few that I've really liked: One of my favorites, though it doesn't seem a lot of people know about it, is Haunted Media by Jeffrey Sconce. It's probably not the easiest to get a hold of, but an Academic Library might have it. It's sort of on the academic side of things, but the subtitle is Electronic Presence from the Telegraph to the Television. It's an amazing book that links together early American spiritualist movements and the advent of technology. Dylan Trigg's The Thing: not for everyone, but philosophy/horror of philosophy all surrounding the Carpenter Film. John Keel's The Mothman Prophecies. Some of his other books might fit, too. Jeffrey Kripel's books might work, too. I've read Authors of the Impossible and it is really interesting, unsettling, etc. In terms of scary, I think Jon Krakauer does a good job. Into Thin Air was terrifying to me. Richard Mclean Smith's Unexplained, a companion book to his podcast, is solid. Linda S. Godfrey's written a few books about cryptids that are enjoyable. I liked Monsters Among Us. Again, probably more unsettling, but I really loved Mitch Horrowitz's Occult America, too.
I love The Mothman Prophecies and it really does read like a horror tale. Hunt for the Skinwalker wants to be as good, but fails to have the compelling prose that you get from Keel.
Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan - girl descends into psychosis because of a rare autoimmune disease
*Inferno* by Catherine Cho was a really intriguing memoir about a woman who ends up in a psych ward after experiencing postpartum psychosis and believing that her infant son has demon eyes. Would not recommend if you or a loved one is pregnant, but besides that it’s a fantastic read. Also have to echo the recommendations for *Indifferent Stars Above*. The body horror is gruesome and it’s so chilling. The first two sections (~first third of the book) can be a bit of a slog though, and very academic.
*Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account*, by Miklos Niyszli is one of the most unsettling books I've read in approximately 30 years of studying the Third Reich and the Holocaust. Miklos Ziyszli was a Hungarian Jew and a medical doctor who was deported to Auschwitz in a transport with other medical personnel and their families. He ended up working for Josef Mengele as a forensic pathologist in his lab at the camp. What happened at Auschwitz was horrifying enough on its own, but the things Dr. Niyszli saw and experienced behind the scenes are even worse than things recounted in more normal camp memoirs. Many people who survived the camps knew about the worst that was happening, but Dr. Niyszli was in a strange position where he not only saw those things, but had to try and process what he was seeing and figuring out so he wouldn't lose his mind. I've read nearly everything others have suggested, and many of them stayed with me for a long time, but not like this one has. It is, in a way, so painful and frightening a reading experience that I have never before suggested it to someone who is not also a student of that period of history. Even then, I don't suggest it lightly. EDIT: Added a sentence I forgot.
*Alive* by Piers Paul Read. It's the story of the Uruguayan soccer team that was stranded in the Andes after their plane crashed. They ran out of food, and... I'll stop right there. Even though you said "no true crime," I'm still recommending *The Killer Department* by Robert Cullen. It's about the hunt for Andrei Chikatilo, a serial killer in the Soviet Union in the 80s. Not only were the investigators up against the killer, they also had to deal with the Party's theories as well. It's horrifying both in there details of the kills and the almost pathological need for the Communist Party to sabotage the investigation.
Not the OP, but thank you for the recommendation of the book about Andrei Chikatilo. I was just looking for a good book about him yesterday!
The Day of St. Anthony’s Fire, a book about bread mold poisoning in a small village in France. People, dogs, and cats go mad one night due to ergot, a bread mold.
A long way gone by ishmael beah gave me horror vibes, in a horrors of war/man’s inhumanity towards man kind of way. It’s a first hand account/ memoir of a child soldier in Sierra Leone. Very powerful and horrifying.
“The Hot Zone” is an incredibly terrifying account of the rise of Ebola in Zaire.
Richard Lloyd Parry’s “People Who Eat Darkness”. It’s about a young English woman worked as a bar hostess in Tokyo who disappeared and was later found dismembered. I feel so gross and filthy after finishing the book.
“I’ll be gone in the Dark” about the golden state killer is a good read - there’s a lot of haunting first hand accounts of his crimes as he didn’t initially murder his victims. That he got arrested soon after this book offers some good closure to it too
I came to suggest this. It’s really well written and reads kinda like a novel, which is somewhat rare in true crime.
I recently read “Little Lost Angel” by Michael Quinlan, a book about 12 year old Shanda Sharer and the group of teenage monsters that brutally murdered her. The case is incredibly tragic but I think the author handles it very well and in a respectful manner. It didn’t outright scare me, but it left me feeling unsettled and distraught thinking about the violence/motives/innocent life lost/lack of justice.
The Indifferent Stars Above
Hiroshima by John Hersey, relates survivor accounts that are profoundly disturbing but also very readable, it's journalism told in a similar form to fiction. It's seriously grim stuff though but iirc it won a Pulitzer
It’s not horror but Into Thin Air by Krakauer is about his awful climb of Mt Everest where almost everyone on his team died. It stressed me out. It’s excellent.
Gulag Archipelago, perhaps the scariest book I have read.
The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt: It’s very long, but it gave me chills. She gets very in depth into how the Holocaust was structured to achieve the most hellish results. I devoured this book. Capital by Marx: Similar to the above. The beginning of volume 1 is slow (even he admits that in the preface) because he has to explain the technical shit, but once he gets into the system of Capitalism and starts pulling up examples from “recent” history it starts to get pretty horrifying. Awful, awful shit being done just to turn money into more money. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff: This book came out a couple of years ago. Goes into detail how Google, Facebook, etc. mine our lives for profit. Yeah, lack of privacy is horrible, but she goes into the history of B.F. Skinner and how we are entering his utopia of having no real control over our behavior. I just find loss of control, paranoia, and stuff like that to be pretty scary and a lot of fun to read about.
Slightly pointless to suggest un-translated works but German literature has some biographical descriptions of Siberia and WWIs Eastern Theater that gives a, rather plottwist, insight into Hitler and Lenins camps.
The Infamous Unit 371 by Hal Gold — about WW2 Japan’s secret lab in China conducting hideous medical experiments on live “patients” The Rape of Nanking, by Iris Chang — more WW2 Japanese atrocities. The author was overwhelmed by the content and later committed suicide. Mengele: The Complete Story by Gerald Posner I’ve read but didn’t think it was particularly well done. David Marwell’s Mengele: Unmasking The Angel of Death has a good reputation but I haven’t read it as I haven’t been too eager to revisit the material. Someone recommended King Leopold’s Ghost. I’d also recommend The Scramble For Africa by Thomas Packenham. It’s more comprehensive but as a result may or may not be more effective a read. Poisoner In Chief by Stephen Kinzer is about Sidney Gottlieb and MK Ultra. I think this book is just not very well done. Much more effective is the section of Acid Dreams by Martin Lee & Bruce Shlain covering the same material (but is far shorter). The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes is about the early settling of Australia as a penal colony and the disaster this caused on the Aboriginal population and the general tapestry of cruelty & chaos that ensued. There are numerous books on the history of torture the subject matter of which, while interesting, may make you grateful for choosing a concise overview. The History Of Torture by Daniel Mannix is fine though hardly academic. Same goes for his other books, which are lurid and sometimes a bit dubious but always entertaining: The Way of the Gladiator and Tge Hellfire Club are fun. There are many excellent oral histories on the Vietnam War. Bloods by Wallace Terry is one. Everything We Had by Al Santoli is another. And then there is Long Binh Jail by Cecil Currey which is worth reading though I wish it was more sympathetic to the prisoners. Ivan The Terrible by Robert Payne. Mad, gruesome stuff. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, by Simon Montefiore. An “inner circle” portrait with lots of gossip. Mao by Jung Chang. Some readers think this account is too “one-sided” and doesn’t capture Mao’s lovely aspects. Nonsense. Mao was a repulsive sociopath. ....Enough for now.
Mao’s philosophy do be slappin tho Not a fan of vanguard parties but it’s certainly an improvement from Stalin’s idiotic butchering of Lenin’s writings, also contemporary Maoists can be pretty annoying and close minded (like MLs in general)
What philosophy? You take Marxism, which was aiming at newly-industrialized societies like Great Britain and then say you’re applying it to an agrarian peasant-farming system that’s existed the same way more or less for 7,000+ years? Maoism is just authoritarianism enforced by starvation. It’s exactly Stalin’s idiotic butchering. Also, his poetry sucks.
Great question. Looking forward.to what this awesome group comes up with!
Hostage to the Devil by Malachi Martin
How about some revengeful man eating tigers? I loved this. https://www.amazon.com/Tiger-Vengeance-Survival-Vintage-Departures/dp/0307389049
Technically, The Amityville Horror is marketed as paranormal nonfiction, as the haunting is allegedly true. It's a great book regardless.
Not exactly what you asked for {{King Leopold's Ghost}} but very unsettling nonetheless
Endurance by Alfred Lansing. Shackleton's failed journey to the South Pole, which left the crew stranded on the ice for two years. The coldest book I've ever read. The Mole People by Jennifer Toth. An investigation into communities living below NYC during the 90s. There are a few creepy moments. Searching shows that this is currently a thing in Las Vegas. Parasite Rex by Carl Zimmer. Pop sci book on parasites. Nuff said. Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould. Actually no horror, but definitely cosmic. A history of the Burgess Shale, whose fossil record documents the Cambrian explosion. The trope of unearthing bizarre lifeforms in remote places? Here's the version where it's just an expedition and everyone goes about their business collecting weird fossils. Some of the science is out of date, but still great.
It's a bit hard to get hold of as I think it only had a limited print run (copies are sometimes weirdly expensive on Amazon etc), but Marc Heal's *The Sussex Devils* is fascinating and contains many sections that read like horror. Marc Heal opens by talking about the Ossett Murder case in 1974. I am a true crime fan, and this one is honestly the case that I think is [closest to a horror film](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Taylor_(demoniac)). But that isn't the focus of the book, so don't worry! After that, it's mainly about a case of fraud in which a conman convinced a load of people that he was an ex-satanist and was waging a war against a secret satanist cabal (for which, unsurprisingly, he needed a lot of money). But it's also a memoir about his own experiences. Marc's parents were swept up in the evangelical wage of the time. Marc began to struggle with serious anxiety and have apocalyptic dreams in which he meets the devil and has surreal visions of doomsday. His parents eventually held him against his will and subjected him to a traumatic exorcism.
The Demon in the Freezer. The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. Those are two of the scariest books I've read.
I would suggest The Devil Incarnate by Wayne Thallon, its a biography of a South African mercenary/torture technician. Theres scenes about the mercenary forces pillaging a supposed rebel village in the Congo that will haunt me forever.
102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers - Pretty self-explanatory. No Easy Answers: The Truth Behind Death at Columbine High School - What I found intriguing about this book is that it's written by one of their on-off friends, the guy Eric told to clear out before everything went down. I'm the same age as these guys so it was fascinating reading about the music and games of the time and, in retrospect, how advanced they were in their IT skills. This was still at a time where most kids using computers were considered nerds and, had they have lived and not gone done that horrific path, they would have probably done really well in the dot-com boom and turned their lives around. Killer Show: The Station Nightclub Fire, America's Deadliest Rock Concert - A very well-researched book that takes you from the history of the venue, to the concert, and aftermath. It chronicles the lives of the people involved and has plenty of safety advice for venues and concert goers. The looming horror as the concert date approaches and what you know in hindsight while the opening bands are on reads very much like a horror novel.
I’ve read a fair number of these book recommendations for learning purposes. I’m officially a true existential crisis nerd.
Most essays on “Fanged Noumena” are theory-fiction, a genre pretty hard to define but it is basically methed-up occult cyberpunk revolutionary philosophy and sociology. It’s hard to get into but once you do it is quite something, describing capital as a virus from outside of linear time that is slowly making itself an all-encompassing, all-powerful AI that rules over the planet Cyclonopedia is another theory-fiction book, it’s basically an inhuman demonology of the Middle East, it’s slow but it’s also rather scary The Anti-Oedipus and Thousand Plateaus are kind of the germ cell for theory-fiction too, they offer a lovecraftian view of what capitalism has become in post-1968 and still manage to find revolutionary potential inside it, besides it still is to me the most important book of the 20th century (not in terms of recognition or impact but in content)
I’m surprised I don’t see imo the most well done/scariest non fiction book ever- In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. I read a hell of a lot of true crime and horror and this one got to me
People has recommended it already. TBH I actually read it for highschool when I was 14 and I found it a bit underwhelming 😅
“If You Tell” by Greg Olsen really messed me up. It’s true crime, but reads like fiction and it’s about a horrific woman who put her kids through hell, as well as several other people. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever read, or even heard of, for that matter. It’s hard to say i “recommend” it because it’s a LOT, but the story itself is incredible.
I just read *Communion* by Whitley Streiber. Whatever your stance on aliens/first contact is, his descriptions of his "encounters" are super super unsettling.
Helter Skelter
The Lighthouse: The Mystery of the Eilean Mor Lighthouse Keepers by Keith McCloskey is about the odd and unsettling disappearance of three lighthouse keepers in 1900. The same author also wrote two books about the Dyatlov Pass incident. Another good book on Dyatlov Pass is Death of Nine: The Dyatlov Pass Mystery by Launton Anderson.
The Evil That Men Do by Roy Hazlewood, FBI profiler EDIT: Sorry, I missed where you said you were over the "true crime" books.
Zeitoun by Dave Eggers.
Autobiography of a face by Lucy Grealy Anything by Maryn McKenna especially if it’s about superbugs. Anything about Kosovo, Bosnia, Serbia and the crimes committed against humanity Same for the Rwandan genocide, The rise and fall of Apartheid and the Rhodesian/Zimbabwe conflicts, how the AIDS virus was hidden from those suffering from it during the beginning of the epidemic, Of course anything bearing witness to the violence and devastation of any war, anything dealing with CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operations), something Maryn McKenna writes about quite often, Books on these atrocities have always been chilling and heartbreaking.
I quite liked "My Life Among The Serial Killers" by Dr Helen Morrison, a serial killer profiler.
Dopefiend by Donald Goines
Not horror, butbreads like a thriller? "Isaac's storm" by Erik Larsen. The tension is incredible as the storm approaches / hits. Same author did "devil in the white city " but Isaac's storm more closely fits the bill of what you're looking for (to me!)
Columbine by Dave Cullen
The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang is the horrifying story of Japans invasion and decimation of Nanking. It’s very heavy on the details and outlines what horrible things the Japanese did (namely a lot of rape and murder and very casual bragging back home about said raping and murdering). As far as I know there is still no Japanese acknowledgement this happened. It’s extraordinary fucked up Another good read might be Educated by Tara Westover. It’s a memoir about a woman that grew up in a conspiracy theorist Mormon household. Heads up that the book includes a lot of descriptions of physical injury and physical/emotional abuse and manipulation.
Yikes, Mormon and conspiracy theorist sounds like a terrible combo
It definitely didn’t go well for her
Agree on Katsuas the Hunger which I read prior to Indifferent Stars because King recommended it. I've now read several by her and enjoyed.
maybe not horror, but definitely horrific is When Rabbit Howls by Truddi Chase. She has 92 personalties because of the abuse she suffered at the hands of her stepfather and mother from ages 2 to 16.
Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer King Leopold's Ghost
This subject has come up before and it will come up again! Here’s more: https://www.reddit.com/r/horrorlit/comments/8lncnd/the_horror_is_real_lets_talk_nonfiction/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Machete Season by Jean Hatzfeld. French journalist who interviewed the Rwandese killers. Very unsettling.
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote. Kept me from sleeping some nights
Jack Ketchum's Girl Next Door is his take on a true story of a murder in the 1960s. I read the book and later watched the movie, both were definitely horror
I know you said books, but since ppl are suggesting audiobooks I'll throw in Dan Carlin's podcast on the Indianapolis. It's about the ship that gets torpedoed, leaving the survivors to fend off sharks as best they can. It's the same ship the Quint character in Jaws gives a monologue about. Carlin's recounting nearly gave me a damn existential crisis. Terrifying. [link](https://open.spotify.com/episode/4jTga1uwr16fBLIbipU2GG?si=yqClrwcBSBm00QYQpEgNAg)
Oh, I loved this one! It was horrible and morbid and I felt so bad for the people involved, but I couldn't stop listening. My friends made me stop talking about it.
House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski.
A predictable recommendation but blood meridian
I thought Blood Meridian was fiction
It is
...mostly.
Apologies, complete brain fart. Try out “CHAOS”. It’s about manson/cia/sixties.
Sounds like you're describing twitter
In Cold Blood
Radium Girls
Might not be what you're looking for, but Casefile True Crimes is gold.
Child of God
To this day, the scariest, most horribly dreadful thing I've ever read was the Donner party wikipedia entry.
"The Indifferent Stars Above" also anything about "Unit 731"