Anyone who knows me knows I can talk at length about horror movies, but just as deep is my love of fairy tales. And both these influences tend to show up when I’m writing speculative fiction, which, on the surface, might look paradoxical at first. However, I consider fairy tales the first horror stories, delving into some of our deepest childhood fears; the fear of being abandoned alone in the woods, of being eaten alive, (possibly by a wolf), of facing the death of a beloved parent. So if you’re like me, and you tend towards the non-Star-Wars-related dark side, here is a list of uncanny CanLit fiction to bring you all the way through to spooky season. These are stories that use horror and fairy tale traditions to talk about our contemporary fears.

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The Marigold, by Andrew F. Sullivan

This eco-horror novel oozes wet and decay and urban legends. In The Marigold, Sullivan blends some truly cinematic horror movie moments (who can resist an oozing hand dragging an innocent teen down into a never-ending dark pit, a scene reminiscent both of The Blob and Stand By Me?) with a satirical take on the effects of Toronto’s never-ending condo development. I read this lakeside, a view of condo cranes high in the air, making this cautionary tale seem all the more prescient.

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Chrysalis, by Anuja Varghese

Varghese’s debut collection is dedicated to all the girls and women who don’t see themselves in the stories they’ve been told, and her haunting stories more than do that dedication justice. Here, an upbeat children’s nursery rhyme functions as a ghost story that conveys the pain of miscarriage. A Cinderella story involving evil stepsisters involves a downtrodden mall worker dancing in flames, albeit wearing a glorious pair of shoes. These tales are powerful explorations of how racialized women are rendered invisible, and the lengths they must go to in order to reclaim their rightful power.

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Red X, by David Demchuk

I idolize Demchuk for the way he does literary horror. In Red X Demchuk, who was deeply affected by the Bruce McArthur serial killings in Toronto, tells the horror story of a predator stalking Toronto’s Gay Village; he is a boy with black hair, a Barghest or black dog, a demonic hell hound, a real life serial killer. In Red X, Demchuk merges fiction and truth, questioning his own relationship with horror and queerness while creating an atmosphere of perfect dread as his vulnerable and very human characters battle both systemic and supernatural evils.

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Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, by Kim Fu

Eerie undercurrents abound in these brilliantly original tales; the stories include haunted dolls, a machine that reprints the dead, and a horrifying children’s toy that has the power to unwind time. These stories, like all good horror and classic fairy tales, explore our relationships with death and the modern world, cautioning us against our own hubris.

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An Ordinary Violence, by Adriana Chartrand

This is a novel that uses horror to explore the effects of the intergenerational trauma wrought by the legacy of colonization on a young Indigenous woman and her family. There are hauntings by a dead mother, eerie visions of animals, and a dark void to another world conjured through terrible magic, which serves as both metaphor and terrifyingly real consequence.

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The Legend of Baraffo, by Moez Surani 

Fairy tales abound throughout this coming-of-age story that answers philosophical questions about power, and whether it is best obtained by working within a system or outside of it. Surani starts this novel with a fairy tale of the protagonist’s invention, a story of the great loves of Isabella that features a fairly gruesome ending for many of the suitors. Like so many of the tales told throughout the novel, this story becomes enchanting only in the retelling (becoming, in essence, the Disney version of itself), in order to hide the inescapable tragedy underlying it. Effortlessly, Surani question the morality of the act of telling the kind of “fairy tales” meant to gloss over the darker side of things.

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The Girl Who Cried Diamonds and Other Stories, by Rebecca Hirsch Garcia

Rebecca Hirsch Garcia’s debut collection is full of horror and fairy tales. Here, there are singing keys and wolves and women locked in towers (well, chained up in a house like some real-life horror stories, but close enough). In the title story, a girl goes from riches to rags when her gift of being able to excrete precious gems instead of bodily fluids leaves her used and exploited--the complete antithesis to a happy ending. I still get chills when I find myself thinking of these stories, a testament to their unique power.

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The Centaur’s Wife, by Amanda Leduc

This is a novel that uses fairy tales of Leduc’s own making to deliver brilliantly imaginative and timely lessons about the harmful effects of humanity’s ecological devastation of the planet, as well as ableism. In Leduc’s post-apocalyptic world, the natural world itself is slowly enacting a reckoning on the human race, a chilling example of fairy tale justice. Meanwhile, the key to saving humanity lies with the centaurs, who are also metaphors for disabled folks, both powerful and misunderstood.

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Learn more about Her Body Among Animals:

In this genre-bending debut collection merging horror, fairy tales, pop culture, and sci-fi, women challenge the boundaries placed on their bodies while living in a world “among animals,” where violence is intertwined with bizarre ecological disruptions.

A sentient sex robot goes against her programming; a grad student living with depression is weighed down by an ever-present albatross; an unhappy wife turns into a spider; a boy with a dark secret is haunted by dolls; a couple bound for a colony on Mars take a road trip through Texas; a girl fights to save her sister from growing a mermaid tail like their absent mother.

Magical yet human, haunted and haunting, these stories act as a surreal documentation of the mistakes in systems of the past that remain very much in the present. Ferrante investigates toxic masculinity and the devastation it enacts upon women and our planet, delving into the universal undercurrent of ecological anxiety in the face of such toxicity, and the personal experience of being a new mother concerned about the future her child will face.

Through these confrontations of the complexity of living in a woman’s body, Her Body Among Animals moves us from hopelessness to a future of resilience and possibility.