Fairies might not seem like the first choice when it comes to “most terrifying” creatures in speculative fiction, but consider: vampires and werewolves, while horrifying, are at heart human. Fairies are completely other. They’re the closest cousin the fantasy genre has to science fiction’s aliens: beings from another realm, whose minds and motives are incomprehensible. (The idea of a fairy changeling calls to mind the terror of Invasion of the Body Snatchers!)

The idea of fairies as tiny, beautiful, and benevolent winged women is a relatively recent invention, dating from the Victorian era, and furthered in our own time by the sanitized versions of fairytales popularized by Disney films. The fairies of Celtic mythology are neither small nor necessarily beautiful; they range from human size to gigantic, many don’t have wings, and they’re frequently malevolent. When not outright evil, fairies are almost always depicted as tricksters, using their charms to manipulate mortals into serving the fairy’s own ends.

My urban fantasy novel Unveiled, the second book of the Changeling P.I. series, plays upon the trope of fairy duplicity. A rogue fey, disguised in human form, seduces women to syphon off the joy producing chemicals from their brains in order to manufacture the magic elixir the fairies need to survive. As private detective Mabily Jones races to unmask this villain and put an end to his crimes, she makes the fatal mistake of thinking she won’t fall for his tricks herself.

No matter how smart humans think we are, we often play right into the fairies’ hands, allowing ourselves to be manipulated. Heck, I’d argue many of us were manipulated by a fairy as children. If you ever saw Peter Pan onstage, didn’t Tinkerbell get you to clap for her?

Here are five novels that prove fairies are, indeed, the most terrifying creatures in fantasy.

Summer Knight, by Jim Butcher

The fourth installment of the Dresden Files deals implicitly with the Fey. Butcher embraces the Celtic traditions while giving them his own characteristic twist. In one minor but moving scene, our hero finds himself in a supernatural swing dance club presided over by the fairy Queen daughter, Maeve. As one of the human musicians plays the most transcendentally beautiful trumpet solo Harry has ever heard, and then proceeds to asphyxiate, the fairy Maeve whispers in the trumpeter’s ear: “There, you see? Never let it be said the Lady Maeve does not fulfill her promises. You said you’d die to play that well, poor creature. And now you have.”

This line perfectly encapsulates the slippery nature of a fairy’s promises.

White Witch, Black Curse, by Kim Harrison

Harrison’s beloved Hollows urban fantasy series has many memorable Fey characters over the thirteen books, but one of the scariest is the banshee villain, Mia. In Harrison’s world, banshees are not the screamers we might stereotypically associate with the word; rather, they’re dark fey who feed on human emotions. The more negative the emotion, the more it nourishes them. When a banshee has a baby, this hunger knows no bounds. But Harrison’s strength lies in how empathetic she makes her antagonists. We can sympathize with Mia, who is a banshee mother; banshee babies have to eat too. But they destroy human souls in the process. It seems the Fey family and their human prey will be locked in a stalemate forever, but the solution Harrison comes up with at the end of the book (no spoilers!) is the most perfect, genius and satisfying resolution you never saw coming!

A Kiss of Shadows, by Laurel K. Hamilton

Hamilton’s fairies might be more commonly thought of as being sexy rather than scary, but the erotic is always set into bas relief by the nightmarish. The powers she gives her fairy princess heroine are truly horrifying, such as the hand of flesh, which grants Meredith the power to literally turn her enemies inside out. Hamilton describes these grotesqueries with the exquisite attention to sensory details usually reserved for a sex scene, and the effect is skin crawling: “She was a ball of flesh about the size of a bushel basket. Nerves, tendons, muscles, internal organs all glistened wetly on the outside of the ball….The sound was the worst: a high, thin screaming, muffled because her mouth was now on the inside of her body, but still she screamed.”

The Stolen, by Bishop O’Connell

This debut novel contains a whole menagerie of Fey beasties that go bump in the night. O’Connell is always meticulously faithful to the Irish mythological roots he draws from, down to the proper Gaelic names. The most frightening creatures in this novel are not the hell hounds who hunt down the hero and heroine, but the Oiche, the dark Fey, who are terrifying in part because they resemble children. The cognitive dissonance of seeing murder and sexual violence perpetrated by characters who are the height and build of a ten-year-old is haunting, and grounds us firmly in the ancient Celtic fairy tradition that these beings are hardly child’s play.

Hatchling, from Lips Touch Three Times, by Laini Taylor

All three of the novellas in this omnibus collection play upon some aspect of the supernatural, but the final story, Hatchling, is by far the creepiest. Changeling stories always imply a question: why would the fairies want to take a human child? The answer in Hatchling is both relatable and chilling. For the immortal Fey, nothing is more fascinating than someone young—so they keep human children as pets. These are kids who are petted and groomed but never loved, which makes the story more disturbing than if they were tortured. While ostensibly YA, Taylor’s book might be too much for some young readers, particularly the scene where the fey Queen and King forcibly “breed” their now grown human captives to create the next generation of pets. Taylor’s Fey have the power to take possession of any human who looks at them: “They can use your eyes as windows and climb inside you, shoving their dark animus into your soul and filling it, like brutal fingers thrust into a child’s glove.” Taylor’s prose lingers in the mind because of the contrast of luminously beautiful language used to describe the ugliest of things. It’s the perfect metaphor for fairies.

Unveiled is available now.