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atmospheric photo of streetlight at night in fog Several books inspired Alan Wake 2’s unsettling take on American horror. Try the five books listed below if you'd like to spend more time in equally creepy fictional worlds. The leaves are falling, it’s getting chilly, and all I want to do is spend my evenings evading zombie-like townsfolk in Bright Falls, the fictional small coastal town in Remedy Entertainment’s horror classic, Alan Wake 2. In Alan Wake and Alan Wake 2, you play as the best-selling crime novelist Alan Wake, whose wife disappears while the pair are on vacation in Bright Falls. Eventually, Alan becomes trapped by the “Dark Presence,” a sinister supernatural force that attempts to coerce Alan into writing a twisted horror story that will come true and free the Dark Presence from its prison. While the Alan Wake games include plenty of traditional hallmarks of horror—cultists, zombie-like creatures, lights flickering on and off—they are also known for their quirky but unsettling metafictional elements. Alan Wake is a story about Alan writing a story about Alan writing a story, and the game plays with this in creative ways. If you’ve already played the Alan Wake 2 DLCs and are looking for additional ways to experience Remedy’s mind-bending take on horror, check out: House of Leaves This year marks the 25-year anniversary of the publication of House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski’s innovative horror novel. House of Leaves tells multiple stories—at its center it’s about a sinister house that is bigger on the inside than the outside, but it’s also about the lasting impact of family trauma. House of Leaves is best known for its stylistic experimentation: one storyline plays out entirely in footnotes, text is often written upside down, and many pages contain only a few words. Remedy’s creative director Sam Lake admitted that House of Leaves inspired Alan Wake 2: “The layered structure of the narrative, the way it comes together and is interweaved, so that you get lost in the labyrinth of it—all of that has been a big inspiration.” Like Alan Wake 2, House of Leaves pulls the reader into the story and blurs the line between reality and fiction. MORE FOR YOU The Raw Shark Texts If you like House of Leaves and want more of its brand of edgy, experimental metafiction, you should check out The Raw Shark Texts (a play on Rorschach tests). British author Steven Hall’s debut novel takes obvious cues from House of Leaves, but it reads more like a thriller than a horror novel. The Raw Shark Texts follows Eric Sanderson as he attempts to recover from amnesia by following a collection of clues he left himself. Eric ends up falling in love while evading an invisible shark that feeds on human memories. This “frightening, funny and daring mess” of a novel sometimes falls flat—it can feel a little pompous and a little forced—but it’s worth a read if you like novels that blur the line between reality and fiction. The Haunting of Hill House Published in 1959, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is an American horror classic. Jackson’s novel focuses on a cast of characters who take up residence in a purportedly haunted house in order to investigate supernatural phenomena. Over the course of the story, the characters become increasingly unstable as they witness, or believe that they witness, a series of paranormal events. What makes The Haunting of Hill House stand out from other haunted house tales is Jackson’s nuanced portrayal of her characters—the novel’s true horror comes from her vivid portrayal of their psychological deterioration. Like Alan Wake, The Haunting of Hill House uses the horror genre to explore the trauma and psychological limits of its characters. White Tears Hari Kunzru’s White Tears is an unsettling horror thriller about two young white men who become haunted by a jazz musician from America’s past. Hipsters Seth and Carter make a killing by selling old-timey audio "authenticity" through their music editing services. One day, the pair post an audio clip they recorded in their travels, but they fabricate the identity of an old blues singer, Charlie Shaw, and claim that the clip is his. Shortly after, they are contacted by a record collector who informs them that Shaw was, in fact, real. What follows is a disturbing, unconventional ghost story that charts America’s history of racism, exploitation, and cultural appropriation. White Tears and Alan Wake are about very different topics, but they both excel at portraying the panic that ensues when reality starts to fall apart. Salem’s Lot Creative director Sam Lake has spoken about the strong influence Stephen King had on the Alan Wake universe, as evidenced by the fact that the original Alan Wake game opens with a quote by King: “Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there’s little fun to be had in explanations; they’re antithetical to the poetry of fear.” The second novel King wrote and one of the author’s favorites, Salem’s Lot describes the horror that unfolds when vampires move into a small town in Maine. While many of King’s stories would be a good complement to Alan Wake 2, Salem’s Lot has much in common with Alan Wake 2: both revolve around a writer trying to complete his next novel. Both are set in small coastal towns and focus on the stagnation and decline of American small-town life. Editorial StandardsReprints & Permissions
