Nature Is Terrifying! 3 Horror Books You Should Read This Spring

It’s Spring! For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, the weather has started to turn, the flowers are blooming, and the Sun has finally stopped being shy. But if you’re an avid horror fan like me, then all this pleasantness doesn’t stem your desire for dark, creepy, or gory stories. With that in mind, I’ve created a list of excellent horror books you should read in Spring.

Before we dive in, I first want to take a moment to explain how I curated the books on this list. My goal was to pick books with themes connected to Spring. These themes are:

Nature and all that it entails. Think flowers and trees, bugs and insects, rainbows and weather.

Rebirth and life. Think new beginnings.

The Troop by Nick Cutter

“The past had a perfection that the future could never hold.”

At the time of writing, I’ve read seven horror books in 2021, and The Troop is my favorite.

Every year, scoutmaster Tim Riggs takes a group of boys out into the Canadian Wilderness for a three-day camping trip. The usual camping activities of sharing ghost stories and making campfires are interrupted when a mysterious visitor arrives on the island. This man is so hungry he’s eating moss off the rocks. It soon becomes clear he’s suffering from something that eats you from the inside out.

“Do you know how hard it is to kill something? Nothing wants to die. Things cling to their lives against all hope, even when it’s hopeless. It’s like the end is always there, you can’t escape it. But things try so, so hard not to cross that finish line. So when they finally do, everything’s been stripped away, their bodies and happiness and hope. Things just don’t know when to die, I wish they did. I wish my friends had known that, sort of anyway. But I’m glad they tried, that’s part of being human right? Part of being any living thing. You hold onto life until it gets ripped away from you, even if it gets ripped away in pieces, you just hold on.”

What Makes The Troop a Good Read?

• It’s a story about disillusionment. Do you remember being a kid and realizing for the first time that adults don’t have all the answers? That the people you rely on to guide and protect you are sometimes clueless and helpless?
• It packs an emotional punch for such a gory story. There’s one scene in particular that made my heart hurt (the turtle for anyone who’s read the book!).
• Creative storytelling. There are snippets of other media like newspaper clippings, lab reports, and interview transcripts weaved between the chapters.

Trigger Warnings

Body horror — I won’t lie; this book can be gross at times, so it’s not for the squeamish.

Graphic animal harm

Why The Troop Made the Cut as a Spring Read

It deals with surviving in nature.

It’s about a new life form wreaking havoc.

The Long Walk by Stephen King

“Any game looks straight if everyone is being cheated at once.”

While most King fans know Carrie to be his first novel, that’s not strictly true. While Carrie was Stephen King’s first published novel, The Long Walk was the first novel he wrote. He wrote The Long Walk in his freshman year at University, a whopping eight years before Carrie was published. Unfortunately for King, the book was rejected by publishers, but he did manage to publish it many years later, in 1979.

The Long Walk is set in an alternative version of the US, where a totalitarian and militaristic dictator rules. In this grim dystopian America, hundreds of teenage boys talk part in the Long Walk. They start at the Canadian border and have to keep walking non-stop while obeying the insane rules of the game — no rest, no sleep, and never dropping under a 4 miles per hour pace. Why do they do this? It’s a dystopian novel, so it’s for national entertainment, of course. The eventual winner gets a prize of their choosing and a large sum of money.

“They got that way, Garraty had noticed. Complete withdrawal from everything and everyone around them. Everything but the road. They stared at the road with a kind of horrid fascination, as if it were a tightrope thay had to walk over an endless, bottomless chasm.”

What Makes The Long Walk a Good Read?

• It’s terrifying in both a slow grinding, oppressive way and an edge of your seat way.
• Excellent characterization. You feel intimately close to the main character, Ray Garraty, so much so that you almost feel like you’re there with him.
• It’s beautifully bleak.
• It’s the kind of horror that really gets into your head. The universe of the book is still similar enough to ours that it seems frightening real at times. Additionally, the book’s premise is terrifying — watching people die around you and knowing you’re only one stumble away? No thanks!

Why The Long Walk Made the Cut as a Spring Read

The story is set in Spring; the walk begins at 9:00 on the morning of May 1st.

No trigger warnings.

Devolution by Max Brooks

“Adversity introduces us to ourselves.”

By the author of World War Z, Devolution is a creative reimagining of the Bigfoot legend. Unconvinced this is going to be a good novel? I don’t blame you. I read Devolution with my partner, and when I described the premise, she said, “Huh, sounds goofy, but let’s try it”. It ended up being the best book we’ve read together.

The novel centers around uncovering what really happened at the Greenloop massacre. Greenloop is a small eco-friendly community complete with six smart homes and a community house. It’s located in a remote location near the volcanic Mount Rainer. When Mount Rainer erupts, the inhabitants of Greenloop are cut off from civilization with no way out. That would be scary enough, but it turns out they have company…

“You can’t blame the people in Greenloop for having their cupboards bare. The whole country rests on a system that sacrifices resilience for comfort.”

What Makes Devolution a Good Read?

• Creative storytelling. The book uses a mixture of diary entries from Kate Holland, a Greenloop resident, and other investigative material like interviews and newspaper reports.
• The book is excellent at conveying how resilient, cooperative, and intelligent human beings really are. It depicts how some people rise to the challenge when disaster strikes, others need a little help, and some can’t get there at all. And it’s not always the people you expect!
• It’s dreadful! It heavily plays on the fear of the unknown and that slow building of dread.

Why Devolution Made the Cut as a Spring Read

It deals heavily with themes of new beginnings, self-discovery, and being vulnerable to nature.

No trigger warnings.

There you go! Happy reading!