The 8 Creepiest Small Towns in Speculative Fiction

Village (“The Lottery,” in The Lottery: And Other Stories, by Shirley Jackson)
It’s a charming summer morning in a charming American village, and the residents are gathering, excitedly, for some sort of village event. If my attentive watching of Gilmore Girls and The Vampire Diaries is to be believed, it’s likely for a bridge rebuilding fundraiser—how sweet. Oh no, it’s some cute ritual to ensure a good harvest, and each family is pulling a name from a black box, and now the family that won the drawing is doing another drawing just amongst themselves…
…
Wait, why do all the villagers have rocks?

Lakeside (American Gods, by Neil Gaiman)
On first glance, the only thing wrong with Lakeside is the cold. Filled with warm, eccentric characters, the town has thrived while its region has slowly decayed—always a good sign that something creepy is going on. And then it turns out that Lakeside’s children have a mysteriously high disappearance rate….
Still, Lakeside is “the farthest south and east of the yoopie you can get pasties,” so that’s not nothing (yoopie apparently refers to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, or the U.P.).

Lovecraft Country (H.P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction, by H.P. Lovecraft)
Lovecraft’s CST’s go less for the small town charm, preferring to head towards creepy somewhat more directly. Scattered across New England, a part of the country bearing quite a lot of the CST burden (when was the last time you read about an adorable California surf town harboring a terrible, dark secret?), Lovecraft’s Arkham, Dunwich, and Innsmouth lurk along the eastern seaboard, frequently economically depressed, sometimes with a Mysteriously High Rate of Disappearing Children, and always hiding something horrible.

Wayward Pines (The Wayward Pines trilogy, by Blake Crouch)
Wayward Pines is adorable Americana from the outside…but who knows what it is on the inside. When Secret Service agent Ethan Burke is stranded in the town after a car accident, he quickly realizes that something is very wrong just underneath the surface of this charming CST—like why are there electric fences around its borders? The Wayward Pines Trilogy was adapted for television this summer by M. Night Shyamalan.

Stepford, Connecticut (The Stepford Wives, by Ira Levin)
A beautiful town filled with beautiful wives, Stepford, Connecticut looks like a great option for families ready to escape the rat race. And it may be, for the male half of the population, but as Joanna Eberhart discovers when she and her family move to Stepford, there’s something wrong with the women. Before they came to Stepford, the Stepford wives were activists, professionals, and artists. Now they’re serene housewives, seemingly content to mindlessly go about their housework. Joanna becomes convinced that the men of the town are somehow behind the transformation, but it may already be too late to save herself….

Omelas (“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, by Ursula K. Le Guin)
The first day of summer in Omelas is a beautiful day, because every day in the utopian city of Omelas is. This particular day (memo #2 to protagonists: beware summer mornings) brings with it a spectacular festival, but really its just life in a perfect city: one with no kings, no soldiers, and no slaves. But there’s always a price, and the price for Omelas’s happiness is that one child, just one child, is kept in misery and torture. When the residents reach a certain age they’re let in on the secret, and most of them decide to go along, while a few decide to leave the shining city and strike out on their own.

Cowslip’s Warren (Watership Down, by Richard Adams)
When a band of rabbits in search of a new home come across an awesome warren with plenty of delicious food, it seems at first as though their prayers have been answered. Sure, there are some strange things going on, and some of the other rabbits seem a little off, but every small town has its eccentricities, right? They decide to go ahead and stay, but when one of their number is caught in an unexpectedly dangerous situation, they realize that Cowslip’s Warren hides a terrible secret….

Midnight, Texas (Midnight Crossroad, by Charlaine Harris)
This place seems nice. It’s your usual sleepy Texas town. Except for all the boarded-up windows. And the fact that much of the town appears to be empty. And the new guy who just moved into the basement of the pawn shop only comes out at night. And that New Age guru lady who openly claims to be a witch, never mind that she seems to talk exclusively to her cat. Hmmm. You know what, it’s a one-stoplight town. Maybe you should just drive on through.