My Top 5 DNF Horror Books I’ve Lied About Finishing

The books a reviewer abandons say more about him than the ones he finishes.

Reviewers are expected to seem certain, which means reviewers can lie about the horror books they did not finish. I have got very good at it. The confident nod at the launch, the “the ending floored me” to an author reading my eyes for the tell. This is the DNF confessional: five horror books I abandoned and bluffed my way through, including the doorstop folk-horror the whole scene insists is essential. Names named, page numbers admitted. Every book I bailed on turned out, on inspection, to be about me. Sorry.

My Top 5 DNF Horror Books I’ve Lied About Finishing

I lied to a man’s face at FantasyCon about a book I abandoned on page sixty, and he bought me a pint to thank me for my excellent taste.

That is the job. Nobody warns you when you set up a review site. You picture the work as reading. The work is mostly the performance of having read, the confident nod at the launch, the “oh, the last act floored me” delivered to an author who is watching your eyes for the tell. I am good at it now. I have had years of practice. I can hold a verdict on a book I bailed on at the quarter mark with the steady gaze of a man who has actually been there, all the way to the back cover, when in truth I got to page sixty, closed the thing, and put the telly on.

A review outlet survives on the assumption that the reviewer finished the book, that the judgment comes from the ending and not from the spot where I quietly gave up. So this one is for you lot, the people who like watching me incriminate myself. Consider it a gift. Consider it the most honest thing I will write all year.

Here are the five I lied about.

1. The Lower Half by Phil Bennett

A killer who collects legs. That is the whole engine, and on paper it is a belter. Vask sets the early chapters going with a butcher’s patience, the detail piling up, the reader slowly understanding what the cellar is for. The prose is lean and the dread builds the way good dread should, quietly, then all at once.

I got to the part where he starts choosing by the calf, and I looked down at my own legs, two pale hairy slabs that have never seen a gym, and I thought, no. Not for me. I knew, with the certainty of a man who reads too much horror, that this book was a warning aimed squarely at me and my wee hairy legs. I could not turn another page without crossing them defensively.

I told two people it was the best body-horror debut of the year. I have no idea how it ends. I assume the legs win.

2. Spirit Level by Londyn Mauro

A killer loose on a building site. Scaffolding, half-poured concrete, a victim count that climbs alongside the floors. Findlay clearly knows his way around a trade, and the kills are inventive in the way only a writer who has actually held a nail gun can manage. The tension in the early scenes is genuine. There is one sequence in a lift shaft I think about more than I would like.

Then the killer, mid-monologue, starts ranting about soft men and their soft little treats, the ones who sit in the van eating sweeties while real work happens around them.

And I felt it. I felt seen. I am a man who keeps a tube of coffee cream chocolates in the glovebox and I will not apologise for it. The book had found me. It was speaking directly to me and my coffee creams, and I could not continue under that kind of scrutiny.

I called it “a sharp, working-class slasher” at a panel. Bought myself another tube on the way home out of spite.

3. Second Proving by Timmy Le Bon

A psychiatrist kidnaps a baker and forces them, on pain of something dreadful, to produce the single greatest cake ever made. It should not work as horror and it absolutely does, because Crane understands that obsession and cruelty share a kitchen. The captivity scenes are tight. The descriptions of the bakes are where she really lets go.

That is the problem. I did not finish it because I spent the entire reading experience drooling on the pages like a dog at a butcher’s window.

By chapter nine I had eaten everything sweet in the house and was eyeing the cooking chocolate meant for an actual recipe. The book made me hungry in a way that felt medically irresponsible. I put on weight reading a horror novel. That has never happened to me before and I resent it deeply.

I told the author it was “deliciously tense.” She did not catch the cowardice in the adjective.

4. The Long Field by Stephanie Queen

Now this is the big one. The doorstop folk horror everyone in the scene swears blind is essential. Eight hundred and something pages. The one you are made to feel daft for not having read, the one that gets name-dropped at every festival by people doing the same nodding I do. I bought it in good faith. I wanted to love it.

I bailed at page sixty.

Sixty pages and I had been given three separate descriptions of the same standing stone, a great deal of mist, and a sense of portent so heavy it could have anchored a boat.

Folk horror lives or dies on patience, I know that, I have defended slow burns in print more times than I can count. But there is patient, and there is a man describing a hill for the fourth time while you check how many pages are left. I checked. There were seven hundred and forty.

I have nodded along to its brilliance at three panels. I have used the phrase “that final movement” with real feeling. I do not know what happens in the field. I suspect nothing, very slowly, for a very long time, and that the people who love it are lying to me the way I am lying to them. We are all just holding hands over a book none of us finished, out in the mist, describing the stone.

5. Plain or Fruit by Bobby Sourghdoughson

A Scottish slasher in which the killer selects victims purely by how they pronounce “scone.” Beck plays it dead straight, which is what makes it terrifying. There is a scene in a Stirling tearoom that is the most tension I have felt in a kitchen since Second Proving, and it earns every second of it.

I could not finish it because I genuinely do not know if I am safe. I have spent my whole life not thinking about how I say the word, and Beck forced me to confront it, and now I cannot say “scone” out loud without hearing the killer behind me weighing the vowel. The book did not scare me as a reader. It scared me as a witness who might be next. I closed it to protect myself.

I told three people it was “the best Scottish horror in years.” That one, at least, might be true. I will never find out.

So there it is. Five books, five lies, one fairly unflattering self-portrait. Because here is the thing I only worked out writing this. None of them failed me. I failed them, every single time, and the reason was never the prose or the pacing or the plot. The reason was my legs, my coffee creams, my appetite, my vanity, my pronunciation. The books I abandon are not bad books. They are mirrors, and I keep flinching.

The lie is the job. The truth is that I would rather you read these and find out what happens, then come back and tell me, gently, what I missed in the field.

Please note that none of these books is real, and any similarity to living authors is intended as a loving joke. So please put that brick down Laura

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