When was the last time a book really scared you?

Every October, my partner lines up a slate of scary movies for us to watch in preparation for Halloween. I am not a fan of horror—I enjoy the ritual of these yearly forays into fright cinema, but I don’t really like the movies that much. Most of them really aren’t scary: once established, the conceits rapidly grow stale, and the movies become a tedious process of getting to the inevitable conclusion. The ones that do work tend to be more upsetting than frightening—The Neighbors scared the shit out of me, but it wasn’t really a pleasurable fear; more like a mild trauma, which has left me with a flicker of nervousness every time the doorbell rings at night. There are exceptions—this last year, for instance, I loved The Babadook, which coupled suspense and startling gotcha! scenes with an underlying existential brooding over the terrors of maternal ambivalence and stress. But overall, I am just not that into horror flicks.

Thanks to BTBA, however, I have dipped my toes into the water of terrifying fiction, and it turns out that I love it. Fiction produces all kinds of emotions, but usually they are more of a slow burn—these books send your adrenaline soaring. You read with breath quickened and muscles tensed. Yet, neither of the two books that I want to tell you about feels gratuitous, or sensationalistic. They’re pure rush, but they earn their effects honestly.

Daniel Kehlmann’s You Should Have Left is a taut, thrilling little terror, part Shining, part House of Leaves. A man goes to the country with his wife and daughter to write, and strange things start happening. The language is straightforward, and the pacing is perfect. The story is creepy, but not upsetting—a purely pleasurable fear. It’s a novel you can burn through in one breathless sitting (it probably takes about the same amount of time as it would take to watch your average horror film!), best enjoyed in a quiet corner of the house on a dark evening or cloudy afternoon.

Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream, by contrast, is a deeply disturbing tale. The terrors it holds have the tinge of coercion: it’s a book you read with your heart in your throat, pushing on through its looser pacing, though you hardly dare to hope for a cheery resolution. The story is opaque: a woman and boy chat in a hospital, the boy pressing the woman to tell her story, seeking answers to his own mysterious condition. As the details are gradually revealed, a terrifying picture emerges through the haze, with the reader sharing the woman’s growing sense of panic. Although it is theoretically possible to read it in one sitting, I could not—I simply had to take a break. In contrast to Kehlmann’s delicious creepiness, Schweblin offers an anxious, gut-wrenching tale. It is just this side of pleasurable—in the midst of your queasiness you find yourself thinking—oh man, this is goooood—and it definitely leaves a mark that will linger long after reading.

If you tend, like me, toward the more intellectual, contemplative reads, check these two out, and remind yourself of fiction’s more visceral powers.

As long as the Best Translated Book Award long list is (twenty-five books—which is pretty long) the majority of the books in translation published in 2017 won’t be on it. Yes, I’m stating the obvious, but it still merits consideration. I’m one of those people who calculates how many books I’ll read before I die, so this is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night.

Bringing attention to those books that could otherwise be forgotten or overlooked in the onslaught of titles published every year is one of the most important things this award does. As a judge I’ve read so many good books that it’s hard to accept a limit on how many we can talk about and promote in the context of the prize. So, I decided to throw a few extra recommendations out there. Here are three completely random books I enjoyed, found interesting, thought worth talking about and which may or may not make it onto this year’s long list.

by Richard Ali A Mutu, translated by Bienvenu Sene Mongaba, has the distinction of being the first novel translated from Lingala, a language spoken by approximately ten million people residing in the Democratic Republic of Congo and neighboring countries, into English. Which means that when it was originally written the likelihood was that it was intended exclusively for non-Western readers. That alone, in an increasingly homogenized literary landscape, makes it worth reading. But, curiosity factor aside, Mr. Fix-It is like an episode in a daytime soap. The protagonist drags us with him on his romantic misadventures and it’s all surprisingly amusing and incredibly sappy and just fun. (Phoneme Media)

by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell. I was hesitant to include this book if only because it gotten a ton of press, from Lithub to the New Yorker—but I found it so quirky that it felt more wrong not to write about it than to add my voice to the choir. The premise is deceptively simple: a dying woman lays in her hospital bed and has a conversation with her friend’s son. Together they attempt to retrace the events that have brought her to the present moment in which they are speaking. The immediacy of the two voices creates an eerie, searching, out-of-time quality similar to A Scanner Darkly (that 2006 movie with Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey, Jr., and Winona Ryder) or 12 Monkeys. Or, better yet, Rick Moody’s novella The Albertine Notes. Which, if you haven’t read it, go do that and then feel free to DM me on twitter. (Riverhead Books)

by the Haitian writer René Depestre and translated by Kaiama L. Glover, is the most traditional of the three books I’ve listed here. Set in the 1930s, it’s the story of a young bride who seemingly dies at the altar from a heart attack, but is actually the victim of zombification. I’d describe the writing as more ribald than erotic, which actually helps to balance and make bearable the magical realism Depestre incorporates into the plot. Hadriana In All My Dreams is narrated from the perspectives of both the bride and her godbrother, a young boy at the time of the wedding who grows into manhood haunted by Hadriana’s fate. This story sprawls outward. The author has created a huge cast of characters, human and otherwise, all of whom he seems to feel real affection for. He writes convincingly about the tension and contrast between Catholicism and Voodoo. And has given us what might be the greatest description of a Haitian Carnival ever written. (Akashic Books)