Photo Credit: Emily Sykes
Good mystery novels are satisfying. They’re all about suspense, deduction and penny-drop revelations told in a formulaic structure that teases a cycle of expectation and reward, all tied together with a sigh-worthy conclusion. But great mystery novels are not the ones you can’t put down. They’re the ones you can’t wait to pick up, again and again, despite knowing the ending – just for the chills. In the words of Victoria Gosling, “While I love a good mystery, what I love more, and what is much rarer to encounter, is a book that is mysterious and remains so after multiple readings. One has the sense the author knows exactly what they’re doing and yet something remains out of sight, concealed within the text, a hidden source of energy.” The novels she recommends will seriously weird you out. They’re stories that unsettle, that linger long after you’ve finished reading.
Moscow Stations
Venedikt Yerofeev, 1969
Written in 1969, Moscow Stations was a Samizdat book, printed illegally and passed from hand to hand. It wasn’t officially published in Russia until 1989. Its narrator is a loquacious alcoholic, sacked from his job for creating uncanny graphs of the amount of alcohol he and his colleagues have put away. On a train bound for the town where his childhood and true love await, Venya drinks, waxes lyrical on history, philosophy and politics, and engages his fellow passengers in conversation while describing possibly the most poetic cocktails ever invented (Komsomol Girl’s Tears, anyone?). Without giving too much away, the journey builds to a delirium tremens of a climax featuring what may be a gang of thugs, or may be the four horsemen of the apocalypse led by Stalin himself.
When We Were Orphans
Kazuo Ishiguro, 2000
Not one of Ishiguro’s better-known novels but to my mind his strangest, When We Were Orphans is narrated by Christopher Banks, who claims to be one of 1930s England’s greatest private detectives. Driven by an unsolved mystery in his own childhood in Shanghai’s International Settlement, Christopher doggedly investigates cases in which he suspects malign forces are at work, just as the reader grows to doubt his own reliability. On the eve of World War II, he returns to China to solve the mystery of his parents’ disappearance and discover the identity of Yellow Snake, believing that if he does, a world catastrophe will be averted.
Under the Skin
Michel Faber, 2000
A woman drives around Scotland’s lonely roads picking up hitchhikers. Or people pretending to be hitchhikers. But that’s okay because she’s only pretending to be a woman. In anyone else’s hands, the plot of this novel would be preposterous but Faber turns in a tour de force. As Isserley – an extraterrestrial sent to Scotland in the form of a human woman – picks off her victims, the horror builds as we are forced to confront a vision of ourselves as equally disposable as those we label less than human. Faber claimed he wrote it because he wanted to “haunt people forever”. Few books have been as successful in doing so as this one.
A Sunny Place for Shady People
Mariana Enriquez, 2024
These short stories by Argentine powerhouse Enriquez will fuck you up. The horror in them takes many faces: the spirit of a drowned girl in a tank of water, a torturer haunting the shadows of a colonial-era mansion, black-eyed children who – in one of the most frightening passages I have ever read – chase a van on all fours, like “rapid spiders…nothing human about their movements”. Unresolved trauma results in terrifying dreams, and yes, the skeletons in Argentina’s psychic closet can be heard rattling loudly here, but the animating force is elemental. Read them and believe in the existence of evil.
Piranesi
Susanna Clarke, 2020
How do you follow up a blockbusting literary doorstopper about magic and fairies? Few would have guessed the answer would be with a slim novel about a watery, labyrinthine House filled with statues and subject to tides. The House is inhabited by birds, fish and Piranesi himself, who roams its halls and believes himself to be its child: “The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.” But who is the Other? Who are the thirteen dead? And who wrote the journals? All of which lead to the ultimate question: who is Piranesi and how did he come to be trapped in the House? A bit less magic then, but far more magical.
Victoria Gosling is the author of Before the Ruins and Bliss & Blunder. In 2011, she founded The Reader Berlin, a platform offering creative writing courses and literary events. She and fellow author Jane Flett are now launching Ink & Salt Retreats, a week of workshops, readings and tutorials in inspiring locations, during which Victoria encourages writers to “not to be afraid of their own strangeness, the oddness or eccentricity that is present in their work”.
