Ten notable scary books by women

Maryse Meijer is the author of Heartbreaker (2016), Northwood (2018), and Rag (2019). She lives in Chicago.

At Publishers Weekly Meijer tagged ten essential scary books by women, including:

In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes

Written in 1947, this noir masterpiece is narrated by a chillingly rational psychopath who stalks Los Angeles in search of young, single women. Hughes resists the sensational, keeping the violence mostly off-stage; instead, what makes Hughes’s novel so compelling and so disturbing is its focus on the mundanity of her killer’s life and motives; many readers will recognize the toxic masculinity seething beneath the surface of a charming, intelligent man who, feeling the world has not given him what he is owed, unleashes his rage on the bodies of women. It’s fast-paced, beautifully written, and almost suffocatingly dark in tone, and yet In a Lonely Place manages to resist cynicism, embracing instead a message of empowerment at its climax, refusing to glorify violence at the expense of its female characters—a truly radical stance that ennobles the murder-mystery genre.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue