Hang back from the horrors of Covid life and take refuge in the metaphors for our larger fears, such as our fear of death or disease or isolation or life itself.

Horror as a genre is built around one truth: that the world is full of fearful things. But the best horror tells us more. It tells us how to live with being afraid.

—Ruthanna Emrys

Here are the most chilling sentences from 12 of what I consider the most fearful works of fiction, many of which are horror, others are thrillers, still others, like Nabokov's Lolita, are only as frightening as their mad or perverted or evil characters.

1. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do?

American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis

Warning: While reading, make sure to keep your doors double-locked, especiallyif you live in a building. This novel about a young, wealthy Wall Street investment banker in whose designer suits lurks a serial killer. But it is, upon closer inspection, a critique of consumerist, capitalist culture.

2. No, the menace of the supernatural is that it attacks where modern minds are weakest, where we have abandoned our protective armor of superstition and have no substitute defense.

The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson

Warning: If you live in an old house, expect the old pipes to wail like a banshee. It’s possible to imagine your cup of hot chocolate moving ever so subtly across the table.

3. Fear creates, defines, and shapes our world, and without it, most of us would have no idea what to do with ourselves. Our ancestors dreamed of a world without boundaries, while we dream new boundaries to put around our homes, our children, and ourselves. We limit our potential day after day in the name of a safety that we refuse to ever achieve.

Feed, Mira Grant

Warning: Not the book to read if you are nursing the flu. In this first book in a trilogy,set in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse,two man-made viruses, mostly benign except as a cure to the common cold and cancer, can go live to convert its host into a zombie.

4. We sometimes need to create unreal monsters and bogies to stand in for all the things we fear in our real lives.

The Shining, Stephen King

Warning: Staycations at old, grand hotels or resorts are not yet allowed, but if you happen to have a weekend place in the countryside, this would be the perfect book to bring with you, unless you’re married to an alcoholic or you are one yourself.

5. Fear is the most basic emotion we have. Fear is primal. Fear sells.

World War Z, Max Brooks

Warning: Good primer for those convinced that this is the end of the world, but resolved to make it to the post-Apocalypse. Nothing like its film adaptation, this is a collection of survivor accounts from various sectors of society, from Hollywood stars and their posse to the military to the religious.

6. As long as you live, there’s always something waiting; and even if it’s bad, and you know it’s bad, what can you do? You can’t stop living.

In Cold Blood, Truman Capote

Warning: Nothing supernatural here, just a robbery that ended in the ghastly murder of four people. Worse, it’s non-fiction.

7. Senseless creatures, you don’t see how much evil is concealed under a little good appearance.

The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio

Warning: Though these are tales from long ago, written in the 14th century, in the wake of the Black Death, it’s very likely you will find yourself in the very same place.  

8. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

Inferno, Dante

Warning: This is a tour of hell, a preview for “those who have rejected spiritual values by yielding to bestial appetites or violence, or by perverting their human intellect to fraud or malice against their fellowmen,” as American poet and translator of Dante’s The Divine ComedyJohn Ciardi put it.

9. The baby kicked like a demon.

Rosemary’s Baby, Ira Levin

Warning: Pregnant women or mothers nursing infants must stay away from this novel, which produced a horror boom upon its publication in 1967.

10. Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.

The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe

Warning: While this narrative poem might not be the best reading material if you’re suffering from a lost love, it might prove irresistible, if you’re one to want to be trapped in your undying devotion.

11. I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t’aimais, je t’aimais! And there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it, my little one. Lolita girl, brave Dolly Schiller.

Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

Warning: The devil here is a sick obsession (that of a middle-aged man with a 12-year-old), but the writing, rife with double entendres, word play, clever puns, and coinages, makes it such an enjoyable read. The weekend is the perfect time to savor this Nabokovian pleasure.

12. The rabbits accept their role in the ritual and recognize the wolf is the strong. In defense, the rabbit becomes sly and frightened and elusive and he digs holes and hides when the wolf is about. And he endures, he goes on. He knows his place. He most certainly doesn’t challenge the wolf to combat. Now, would that be wise? Would it?

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey

Warning: Watch out for Nurse Ratched!