Eight top bad seed novels

Nathan Oates’s debut collection of short stories, The Empty House, won the Spokane Prize. His stories have appeared in The Missouri Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Copper Nickel, West Branch, The Best American Mystery Stories, and elsewhere. He is an associate professor at Seton Hall University, where he teaches creative writing. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his family.

Oates’s new novel is A Flaw in the Design.

At CrimesReads he tagged eight novels featuring "bad seeds and the threat they pose to their families, their communities, and, in some cases, the world." One entry on the list:

Pet Sematary, Stephen King

Speaking of innate evil: The revenant child (and, before that, cat), in what I think is King’s scariest book, is a visceral evocation of our most primal fears of parenting. Rereading it now, I find the accident on the road as terrifying and awful as any of the supernatural terror that surrounds it. King has an unusual and unmatched ability to tap into childhood fears – an evil-tainted graveyard in the woods here, but I’m also thinking of the basement in Salem’s Lot, and the drainage tunnel in The Shining – and rework them so that childhood fears are awakened and magnified in the adult mind. This is, perhaps, at the heart of all horror, and few writers do it as well.

Read about the other titles on the list.

Pet Sematary is among David Barnett's top ten books about graveyards, C. J. Tudor's six thrillers featuring terrifying changelings, Jeff Somers's top 25 cats in sci-fi & fantasy, Jessica Ferri's five top books on American small towns, and Sandra Greaves's top ten ghost stories.

--Marshal Zeringue