Six horror titles where the setting itself Is evil

Mary Berman is a Philadelphia-based writer. She earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Mississippi, where she was a Graduate Excellence Fellow, and she also holds a BA in writing seminars from Johns Hopkins University.

Her short works have been published in Cicada, PseudoPod, Fireside Magazine, and elsewhere.

Until Death is Berman's debut novel.

At CrimeReads the author tagged "six horror novels where the place is the problem." One title on the list:

Giorgio de Maria, The Twenty Days of Turin

This 1977 Italian novel, detailing a “phenomenon of collective psychosis” in the gothic city of Turin, is packed to the gills with ambitious, weird, bizarre imagery that chills the bones. A mysterious Library that eerily foreshadows social media; mass insomnia; people killed by someone picking them up by the ankles and smashing them into trees; anonymous letters from a man whose stairwell is filling with human excrement and trash; a man with a dried-up lake inside of him, and he can see bas-reliefs on the bottom, and they fills him with terror and dread.

De Maria’s Turin is the truest kind of horror setting there is, both haunted and doing the haunting. And the mass psychosis of the citizenry underscores a fact that we—thanks, Internet—now know only too well. De Maria knew it too. “What is shared can never be unshared.” In fact, it can haunt you.

Read about the other entries on Berman's list at CrimeReads.

--Marshal Zeringue