by Lee Sutton
Fear is one of our most basic emotions. It teaches us how to survive, but it also makes us curious about things we don’t understand. We want to know what’s behind the door, even when we have enough sense to leave it shut. When I read horror, I get caught in the story. Afterward, I want to understand how the dread accumulated, why an image won’t leave me alone, and how something impossible became convincing. Five books in particular have changed what I pay attention to as a reader and what I’m willing to attempt as a writer.
LESSON: grounding the unbelievable with a rational character
TEACHER: The Outsider — Stephen King
In The Outsider, a murder investigation confronts Detective Ralph Anderson with evidence that refuses to make sense. I trusted Ralph. I felt I knew this man. King wasn’t afraid to let him be wrong, which made his eventual self-doubt matter even more. Through Ralph, King lets the reader consider reasonable explanations, then takes them away one by one. I found myself believing alongside him. That influenced how I approached the sheriff in my own novel-in-progress. I wanted a good, rational man who could ask the reader’s questions and follow the evidence wherever it led. Ralph showed me how a grounded character could make the impossible convincing.
LESSON: nesting stories for a more haunting narrative
TEACHER: The Fisherman — John Langan
The Fisherman follows two grieving men whose fishing trips draw them toward a dark local history. I connected with Abe’s grief over the loss of his wife before I knew where Langan was taking me. Then the story opened into a deeper story with a mythology so rotten that I still remember that windswept beach, the black water, the leviathan offshore. Langan gave me permission to put a nested story inside my own novel, and he showed me how it could work. The first story made the second more haunting. Even at its most cosmic and terrifying, the novel kept me connected to something as intimate as missing the person you love.
LESSON: Toying with the reader’s assumptions
TEACHER: Tender Is the Flesh — Agustina Bazterrica
Tender Is the Flesh imagines a society that treats human beings as livestock. What disturbed me most was how ordinary the cruelty felt. That casualness disturbed me, but the ending is what left me reeling. I’d assumed that following someone so closely meant I could expect some essential goodness, or at least a desire to become better. Bazterrica made me question how much of that belief came from the page and how much I’d supplied myself. I won’t spoil what happens. What stayed with me was the difference between understanding a character and trusting him. It made me reconsider what readers might assume about the people I ask them to follow.
LESSON: Withholding information to keep the reader off balance
TEACHER: A Head Full of Ghosts — Paul Tremblay
In A Head Full of Ghosts, a family allows a reality television crew to document their teenage daughter’s apparent possession. Tremblay had me questioning what I believed and why. Every time I thought I understood what was happening, another detail unsettled that certainty. I loved the sleight of hand, the sense that more than one interpretation could survive the final page. It made me consider how carefully a writer chooses what to reveal, what to withhold, and whose account the reader trusts. I wanted to give my own readers that experience: arriving at an answer, then remembering something that makes them question it again.
LESSON: Experiment with structure and form
TEACHER: House of Leaves — Mark Z. Danielewski
House of Leaves centers on a house that’s larger inside than outside, but the book itself was the revelation for me. I’d never thought so much about how words occupied a page. The layout shaped how I moved through the story. I had to turn the book, follow its detours, and pay attention to the spaces between the words. Danielewski made me think of writing as literal art. Even the physical act of reading could become part of the storytelling. That gave me permission to question the structures I’d assumed I had to follow and ask what form my own story needed.
What these books gave me was permission: to follow a reasonable person beyond the limits of reason, to let one story open into another, to stay with the darkness, to leave room for doubt, and to imagine a different shape for the page. I’m still curious about what’s behind that door.
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Lee Sutton is a student in Judith Lindbergh‘s Adult Writers Circle in Verona, NJ. Originally from North Carolina, Lee trained in classical theatre at the North Carolina School of the Arts and New York’s Stella Adler Conservatory. She toured extensively with the New York Shakespeare Festival and co-authored an off-Broadway play. She has studied writing for more than a decade and is currently working on a folk and cosmic horror novel set in western North Carolina.
