Favourite Books and Shows That Shaped My Speculative Novel (Part 1)

When people ask what inspired my current speculative novel, I never have a simple answer. Stories don’t come from a single place. They arrive like weather: a storm built of fragments, voices, warnings. My novel was born of all the things I could not say out loud...of echoes—grief, love, memory—and it carries all their names; but also it was born of the works that unsettled me enough to change the way I breathe.

Some stories don’t just entertain; they rewire you. They whisper that the world can be dismantled and rebuilt. My novel is stitched from these whispers, though it walks its own path.

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale taught me that the most terrifying regimes don’t scream; they sign forms. They weaponise paperwork, medical records, compliance training. From Atwood I learned that silence itself can be deadlier than noise.

Sophie Mackintosh’s The Water Cure gave me permission to linger in atmosphere, to trust the uncanny stillness of water and breath. Its lyric intensity showed me that dread doesn’t always need plot to advance; it can bloom out of repetition, out of the texture of a single line.

Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers carved its way into me with its portrait of motherhood under surveillance. I remember finishing it with my chest aching, realising how easily love could be turned into data, how care itself could become something monitored and punished. That unease sits at the heart of my novel.

Han Kang’s The Vegetarian isn’t strictly dystopian, but it shattered me. The way a single woman’s refusal becomes monstrous in the eyes of others, how transformation is both horror and liberation — taught me more about terror than any apocalypse.

Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle reminded me that the house is never neutral. Walls remember. Windows judge. The claustrophobia of domestic space bleeds into every dormitory and corridor in my novel.

And it wasn’t only books.

Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House (Netflix) showed me how ghosts can be grief itself, how memory can twist architecture into a trap. Its layering of time, trauma, and family gave me the courage to let my novel slip between the past and present, between memory and hallucination.

And closer to home, في كل أسبوع يوم جمعة (Every Week Has a Friday), an Egyptian series, haunted me with its mix of intimacy and violence, its refusal to sanitise trauma, and its exploration of how cruelty seeps into ordinary life. Watching it reminded me that horror doesn’t have to be gothic or foreign; it can rise from the streets you know, the neighbours you once greeted. That insight is embedded in the domestic terror of my novel.

From these books and shows, I carried fragments: the bureaucratic chill of Atwood, the lyric dread of Mackintosh, the maternal surveillance of Chan, the transformative horror of Kang, the gothic claustrophobia of Jackson, the grief-haunted corridors of Hill House, and the raw, intimate brutality of Every Week Has a Friday.

When I look back, I see that these works didn’t just influence me; they gave me permission. Permission to write something feminist, strange, poetic, horrifying. Permission to imagine a future that feels too close for comfort. Permission to believe that a woman’s scream—fractured, unpretty, raw— could be the most radical act of all.