Top 3 Nastiest Books of 2020
It wasn’t all romance in my reading diet this year. Depending on my mood, I might pick up a comfort read, but more often than not I want to indulge in something dark, something twisted, and something truly nasty. I can’t really explain why I like horror, and the truth is I’m not the best horror fan. Maybe a true horror fan doesn’t lie awake at night suffering from intrusive thoughts of the more graphic scenes of a book or movie. I imagine that they aren’t scared by the likes of The Shining, or even slightly disturbed by the Saw franchise. I may love darker content, but I’m a highly sensitive reader.
I would argue that being an empathetic reader is all the better for enjoying horror. The less sensitive you are, the less of an effect the author’s intended torture has on you. Perhaps, I’m just the right amount of curious and easily manipulated. Good horror, just like a good romance, needs believable fully formed characters. Just as you need to care about your romantic leads to care about the eventual romance, you need to care about the characters in a horror novel to care about their inevitable doom.
In this way, these genres are two sides of the same coin. It’s just that on one side, you want good things to happen to the character and on the other, you watch in horror as your characters navigate a series of truly unfortunate events.
The better the storyteller, the better the horror writer. The best horror isn’t about schlocky graphic murder scenes. We are drawn into the characters in their world and tricked into caring about them. With all that being said, it’ll be no surprise that the most acclaimed horror writer is the first author on this list-
3. Pet Semetary, Stephen King, (1985)
Pet Semetary was the book King says he thought twice about publishing because of its content. It was a story that even disturbed him, so you know it’s a good one.
I’m not the biggest Stephen King fan. Sometimes, he just doesn’t know when to end a novel. Or it’s a slog to get through all the extraneous details to get to the core of the plot. His works seem to be polemic. It seems that as many people love a King novel as those who don’t.
I think Pet Sematary is different. It was the kind of book I felt sad to finish and leave the characters behind. It kept me engaged throughout and a little bit creeped out. I loved the ideas underpinning the novel. This book is up there with King’s best ideas, like The Shining and IT.
It’s hard to talk about this book without spoiling it but I will try to give a basic outline of the story. Louis Creed and his family have recently moved into a new home in a town called Ludlow. It’s a strange location for two reasons, first, they live by a road that is frequented by large trucks.
The other strange thing about the property is that it backs onto a graveyard of sorts, the area has been named the Pet Sematary by the kids in the area and it acts as the resting place for the beloved pets of the neighbourhood. But Louis soon discovers that the cemetery is much larger than the initial pet graveyard, and what is beyond has the supernatural ability to bring to animals back to life.
I think what really makes this story work is not just a great concept, but the family narrative King establishes as the story unfolds. I have read my fair share of Stephen King novels and this one is hands down my favourite. It’s not a perfect novel but it was one I left feeling sad it was over and I found it hard to find a good follow up afterwards.
King can leave me feeling exhausted. His novels can feel like a marathon as I often feel myself pushing to get to the end. Yet, Pet Semetary didn’t have the same bloated feeling that I got from say, The Shining. If you’re new to his work, I think Pet Sematary is a great starting point. I genuinely just really enjoyed this novel and it was one of the highlights on my reading list this year.
Was it scary though? I did honestly find it a little disturbing. Certain parts of the text made my skin crawl. Especially one bit where a zombie dog was described to have cold licks. Something about that image really bothers me but in a good way. Any hardcore horror fans won’t find this scary at all, and to you, I ask, what’s that like?
2. The Devil All the Time, Donald Ray Pollock (2019)
As is to be expected with these multiple narrative threads, they all slowly converge. The fun of the narrative is how these characters collide with one another, along with various other sub-characters who make continued appearances throughout the novel.
The book may be called The Devil All the Time but a major theme running through the novel is the lengths some will go to please god. Willard creates an altar to pray that his wife, Charlotte, will recover from a particularly aggressive cancer. This is early on in the text and introduces the graphic nature of the writing that kept me invested throughout. Praying at an alter may sound innocent but Willard takes his acts of sacrifice in the name of the lord to an extreme.
After Willard’s and Arvin’s daily impassioned prayers go unanswered, with Charlotte’s situation worsening with each passing day, Willard decides that he must start making sacrifices to god. He starts to make animal sacrifices at his altar. The text spares no detail in how truly disgusting this altar becomes as the animal sacrifices accumulate. It makes sense, as the setting is full of decaying carcasses, but that doesn’t lessen the gritty reality detailed in the text.
And that’s just the beginning of The Devil All the Time. The serial-killing couple, Sandy and Carl, are particularly nasty. They use their victims as models for a photography project, that obviously gives Carl some sexual gratification. Just to make it all the more sickly, they call their victims their “models”. They were the vilest characters in a book full of degraded people doing truly awful things.
If you crave relatable and good-hearted characters in your novels, you’ll find that they are thin on the ground in The Devil All the Time. But I assume if you started reading this post you are a big horror fan, in which case, you will probably really enjoy this. There’s also a Netflix film adapted from the text. The film isn’t quite as good as the book but it’s a fairly loyal adaptation.
Was it scary though? No, not really. It was more disturbing, but there’s some original storytelling to be enjoyed, or perhaps endured as our characters' predicaments go from bad to worse. If you’re one of those horror fans who require big scares and have a strict definition of what constitutes horror, perhaps this isn’t for you. But maybe the next book might work for you...
1. The Troop, Nick Cutter (2016)
This book is more specifically about worms. Worms that infect people and expertly feed on any nutrients that enter the body, and eventually consume the body itself, before they move onto another host. This super parasite was created in a laboratory. Ostensibly, this super parasite was created as a weight-loss tool by which the customer would infect themselves with worms, reach their required weight, and then kill them off. Of course, the experiment went completely awry, and the test subject escaped from the lab and unleashed this nasty parasite on the public.
The test subject ends up on a remote island, the only other inhabitants being a scoutmaster, Tim Riggs, and a group of boy scouts. Tim is also a doctor back on the mainland and he sees that the test subject is very sick. In Tim’s attempt to help this man, he becomes infected with these worms, which of course causes absolute chaos amongst his troop. From here, the book rapidly develops into intense survival horror.
This parasite is extremely effective at infecting new hosts and how the worms do this was the most traumatic part of the read for me. The other horrific aspect of this book is that the infected become insatiably hungry. Initially, the host will just binge eat food, but soon their ravenous hunger will drive them to eat indiscriminately. I’m talking about eating bugs, wallpaper, grass, and even disgustingly, their own hair. There’s worse of course, but you’ll have to read the book to find out more.
Mind the pun, but I devoured this book. It was so horrific, I just couldn’t look away. I also became attached to the characters. Especially one of the boy scouts, the wholesome Newt. I needed to know that he made it out of the life or death situation safely. Cutter also managed to write one of the vilest characters I have ever come across in a novel, the sociopathic Shelly.
All this to say that I really enjoyed this novel. Well, perhaps I was more in awe of it. I wouldn’t recommend it to just any reader, as I may have not been able to look away but I was honestly nauseated for a lot of my reading of The Troop. At the top of my list of the nastiest books I read in 2020, and this one won’t disappoint.
Was it scary though? I did actually find this one very disturbing, and thrilling. It was disgusting enough to give me nightmares and recurring daymares. Read with caution. This book is also full of potential triggers, including animal abuse.
Good luck I guess. If you are after some really nasty reads, I hope these books are hardcore enough for you.
Keep in mind, I’m a total wuss.
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