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People often say that life imitates art, but sometimes art imitates reality television shows. It make sense that reality TV has crept into so many of our favorite horror novels. After all, these unscripted TV series have become such a huge part of our lives. Who isn’t watching The Traitors, the campy and suspensive reality competition show where contestants murder each other to win? Sounds like the perfect setting for a horror story, does it not?
Here are three horror novels that turn the world of reality TV into a dark, twisted place. Or at least…slightly more dark and twisted than it is usually.
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Grim Root by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam
Two of the books on this list are inspired by one of the biggest mainstays in reality TV, The Bachelor. Who can blame authors for wanting to write horror based on that show? What’s more horrifying than agreeing to marry a man you barely know after only, like, two dates? Especially when he’s been dating 20ish other women at the same time? In Grim Root, a Bachelor-like TV show gets ghosty when the contestants find themselves spending a week in a haunted house. But when the bachelor dies, all bets are off.
Patricia Wants to Cuddle by Samantha Allen
This novel is about a reality TV dating series called The Catch which is definitely not anything like The Bachelor (except it totally is). The bachelor is down to his final four ladies, and the crew heads to a remote island in the Pacific Northwest to film their next round of dates. What could possibly go wrong, right? Little does the cast and crew of The Catch know what awaits them on the island. Patricia might be a little furry and a little violent. But mostly she’s just misunderstood. All she really wants to do is cuddle.
Battle Royale by Koushun Takami
If you’re more of a competition/survival-based TV fan, this is your book. Before there was The Hunger Games, there was the much bloodier and more relentless Japanese horror novel Battle Royale. In this book, a class of junior high students is sent to a private island where they are forced to fight each other to the death.
If you’ve only ever seen the 2000 movie based on the novel, you’ve got to pick up this book. Although this book isn’t as rooted in reality TV as the other books on this list, it has inspired a lot of reality TV-based books and series.
Craving more reality TV in your fiction? Check out these dramatic books about reality TV. And these reality TV thrillers and mysteries!
