Well folks, I’m writing from a hotel room at a friend’s wedding, and I haven’t talked enough about books yet (even though it was a very nerdy wedding). So, from my hotel room to all of you, here we go: this week’s theme is a Halloween freebie, and I’m here to tell you about books that have freaked me out…

1. Feed, by Mira Grant. When I first read it, it was before the point where I began to try to get curious about my fear of infectious disease, so it was a bit of an unexpected choice for me in many ways. When I initially read it, I didn’t love it — but I later read it again and again, liking it a bit more each time. I don’t think it still freaks me out in the same way, but the fear of infection which drives the story really got under my skin.
2. What Moves The Dead, by T. Kingfisher. This was a much more recent read, of course (just last week!), and I’m a lot more comfortable taking about diseases in general now than I was back then. Still, the fear of contamination drips off this story, and it was probably only Kingfisher’s skill as a writer that kept me reading this one.
3. Spillover, by David Quammen. I know, you probably weren’t expecting non-fiction on this list, but you might be recognising a theme about the things that scare me. I read this book when I was just beginning to see that my fears lessened if I got curious about the subject. It still freaked me out, but it also put me on the path I’m on now (final year of my MSc in Infectious Diseases!).
4. Heaven Official’s Blessing, by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu. Horror isn’t the primary genre of this book, for sure, and it’s not even one that I’d necessarily mention in talking about the book. But there are some genuinely freaky, gross and gory things here, like the buried head in Banyue (I’ll avoid describing anything too graphic and leave it at that: if you know, you know). The main character, Xie Lian, suffers some really horrendous things throughout, as well, some of which is horrifying to contemplate (for example being staked into a coffin, unable to die, for a century or two).
5. Leviathan’s Wake, by James S.A. Corey. This is more sci-fi than horror, especially the later books, but the first book in particular includes a lot of body horror.
6. Sleeping Giants, by Sylvain Neuvel. This one isn’t horror at all, but the moment where a guy has an accident and they use the excuse to turn his knees around so he can better pilot a massive alien mech is quite shocking, and it’s stuck with me ever since.
7. Catching Breath, by Kathryn Lougheed. Another non-fiction for you! I don’t think I was specifically interested in tuberculosis before I read this book, but ultimately I wrote my undergrad dissertation about tuberculosis, because Lougheed convinced me that we don’t pay it enough attention at all — and we should. Drug resistant tuberculosis is scarily hard to cure.
8. Brain on Fire, by Susannah Cahalan. Cahalan experienced a bizarre illness that appeared to be a mental breakdown, and turned out to be an infection. The idea of such a misdiagnosis is terrifying, and some of her early symptoms matched with some of my genuine anxiety symptoms, which was a whole weird thing. There’s a good chance inflammation (not necessarily triggered by infection, but sometimes — and probably more than we think) is actually causing mental illness in some cases (who knows how many). The things we don’t know about our brains definitely freak me out!
9. The End of Everything, by Katie Mack. Non-fiction about physics breaks my brain sometimes — contemplating the massive size of the universe makes me think a lot of stuff about my own significance, what I think happens when we die, etc, that is anxiety-fuelled in the worst way. Is this an obvious choice for a list of books that freaked me out? Nope, but you weren’t asking me to jumpscare you, just what jumpscared me. This was a good book in general — but a bad one for me.
10. He Who Whispers, by John Dickson Carr. There’s a particular scene in this one where I remember thinking, “dang, that’s actually creepy.” It’s a classic mystery — but a particular character is just twisted, in a way that surprised me very much as a first-time reader!

It’s an idiosyncratic list, but it’s mine!