Psychological Horror

Edgar Allan Poe set the pattern. In “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843) a narrator insists on his sanity while describing a murder, and the horror is in his voice. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) traced a woman's breakdown under a “rest cure,” and Henry James' The Turn of the Screw (1898) left readers unsure whether its ghosts were real.

In the mid-twentieth century the form found its modern shape. Robert Bloch's Psycho (1959) and Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House (1959) appeared in the same year, and Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby (1967) made paranoia its engine. Stephen King's The Shining (1977) and Misery (1987) put ordinary minds under extraordinary pressure.

Since then the form has drifted between horror and literary fiction. Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho (1991), Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves (2000), Paul Tremblay's A Head Full of Ghosts (2015), Iain Reid's I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2016) and Catriona Ward's The Last House on Needless Street (2021) all make the reader doubt the person telling the story.

Expect tight, close points of view, unreliable narrators and slow-building unease. Isolation is common: a snowed-in hotel, a remote house, a mind cut off from other people. Twists that recast everything before them are a staple.

The shelf blurs into thrillers and literary fiction, and some books here have little or nothing supernatural in them. Readers who come for shocks may find it slower than other horror, and readers who stay usually do so for the sense of dread.