Best books…chosen by Sarah Langan

Horror novelist Sarah Langan, a three-time Bram Stoker Award winner, is the author of Good Neighbors and The Keeper. In her new novel, A Better World, a family relocates to an idyllic, exclusive company town only to discover it has a sinister side.

The Group

by Mary McCarthy (1963). McCarthy follows eight Vassar graduates over about 15 years, introducing themes of mental illness, domestic abuse, abortion, gayness, and some serious frenemy action. When I picked up the book, I worried it would be about privileged chicks sweating the shininess of their tea services. It is, and you know what? Their lives aren’t so easy, either.

Rosemary’s Baby

by Ira Levin (1967). Levin’s feminist masterpiece about a woman gaslit so badly by her husband that she unwittingly carries Satan’s child still feels relevant today. There’s a great line, about halfway through, when Rosemary wants to seek a second medical opinion about her agonizing pregnancy and her husband objects, saying, “It’s not fair to

Dr. Sapirstein.”

The Dead Zone

by Stephen King (1979). This could have been written today, about now. Johnny Smith wakes from a years-long coma with psychic abilities, only to discover a world chock-full of protests, corruption, religious zealotry, and crumbling faith in the American dream. Rising up from this quagmire comes a

demagogue who, as only Johnny knows, is going to destroy the world.

Sharp Objects

by Gillian Flynn (2006). This is a spectacular story about a dysfunctional family and the pressures and cruelties heaped on women. Like most honest accounts of being gaslit, it’s also really pissed off. Flynn mastered the twist ending with this book. I’ve seen lots of imitations, but nobody else does it this well.

The Ballad of Black Tom

by Victor LaValle (2016). This one’s sneaky. It’s a rebuttal of H.P. Lovecraft, but it reads more like the best kind of noir, about cogs in systems of inequity who are starting to see what they didn’t see before. I don’t know how LaValle came up with this plot. It’s singular genius.

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters

by Emil Ferris (2017). Ferris’ 400-page graphic novel is a masterwork of beauty and poignancy. It’s about a girl in turbulent 1960s Chicago who imagines herself as a wolf-monster detective and who takes on much more than a murder mystery. My one qualm is that it ends on a cliffhanger. Happily, Part 2 comes out next month.