Grief makes us withdrawn, desperate, helpless against the permanence of death or loss or the what-could-have-beens littering our past. It’s one of the few times that when a character in a novel or movie makes a rash decision or leaps to some grand conclusion, I can understand it. In fiction, it can turn someone towards the horrific: a monster in the basement, a ghost walking through their walls. I can understand how desperate a character is for their wife to come back from the dead, how willing to believe in aliens or another world or magic spells if it means their son laughs at a silly joke again. Grief makes desperate creatures of us all. Some people find catharsis in reading about characters going through the same thing they are. Grief can be isolating to an extreme, so reading a character having the same thoughts and feelings can combat some fraction of that. For whatever reason you might be interested, here are eight horror novels about grief in its many different forms. If you’re looking for more novels about grief, try these novels about grief and recovering from trauma or these YA novels about grief.
