when i think about literary horror, i think about house of leaves — the navidson record, specifically, which is an academic analysis of videos recorded in and around the house. there are sections of this book which i really dislike, but when it's good it's good. it's a brilliant reimagination of the haunted-house trope: the house itself is haunted, with inexplicable changes to its architecture, the inside eventually becoming indefinitely larger than the outside. but it's also about human hubris, too. so many men willingly go inside the house's ever-changing pitch-black tunnels, convinced that they will be able to make sense of it — for glory, or for curiosity. but it's the distance and the speculation which really makes it creepy: in-universe, this thing has swept academia by storm, with endless articles and conferences and books about what's real, what each recorded gesture or grimace might have meant. it satirises academic navel-gazing, and is quite amusing in places, but also chillingly invasive and callous. and then, you're also reading a record of a record of a record, and flipping around the book for footnotes and indices and endnotes, and things are censored or 'lost,' and there are whole forums full of people going crazy about what everything means — the form parallels the content. house of leaves is creepy in a lot of different ways. it's a huge text. it's creepy if you take it at face value as a haunted-house story, and creepier still if you choose to consider the in-universe circumstances for that story even being told — which is to do with a whole other narrator that i haven't touched on at all. the ergodic nature of the book — as an artefact, a real collection of documents — is a fundamental aspect of the horror from both perspectives. i think there's something very special about that

This question requires some definition of terms. Others will surely disagree but here are my criteria: - I call a book literary when its appeal is about more than just plot, i.e. the form or style is crafted to give pleasure in its own right, or to contribute in its own right to the overall impression left by the book rather than being there simply to convey narrative. - Fantasy I take to be stories whose plots couldn't happen under the laws of physics, i.e. there is something that defies rational explanation like magic, cryptids, supernatural phenomena, etc. - Science fiction is what I call stories set in the future, in space, or in alternate realities (including time travel stories). - Horror is a book that's meant to give you the creeps. Based on the above, here are a few titles that I think are literary (some qualify for multiple genres): Fantasy Vorrh Trilogy - Brian Catling The Master and Margarita - Bulgakov The Picture of Dorian Gray - Wilde Orlando - Woolf Days Between Stations - Steve Erickson Herma, Bull Fire, Screenplay, The Little People - MacDonald Harris The Log of the SS The Mrs Unguentine - Stanley Crawford The Image of a Drawn Sword - Jocelyn Brooke But for the Lovers - Wilfrido Nolledo Midnight's Children - Rushdie The Land of Laughs - Jonathan Carroll The Vet's Daughter, The Juniper Tree - Barbara Comyns The Blizzard - Vladimir Sorokin Life and Death are Wearing Me Out - Mo Yan SF The Third Policeman - Flann O'Brien Riddley Walker - Russell Hoban A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court - Twain Lanark - Alasdair Gray The Age of Wire and String - Ben Marcus Omon Ra - Victor Pelevin Venemous Lumpsucker - Ned Beauman The fiction of Lucius Shepard Station Eleven - Emily St John Mandel Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell Much of J.G. Ballard Too Like the Lightning - Ada Palmer Version Control - Dexter Palmer The Thing Itself - Adam Roberts Horror Dance of the Dwarfs - Geoffrey Household The fiction of Robert Aickman The Other - Thomas Tryon