The question I pose is a pretty simple one:
What is the scariest book you’ve ever read?
It doesn’t need to be horror, of course, though I expect a good bit of horror to creep and skulk through. And you can talk about comic books, too, if you’re so inclined.
Note: I’m not asking about your favorite scary book. I’m asking about the one that scared you, or freaked you out, or disturbed you on some fundamental level.
I get more than a little freaked out by serial killer books. Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite is an early one that got under my skin. Recently, worth noting Mister Slaughter, by Robert McCammon — pre-Revolutionary War serial killer tale, with tension so taut it was like a rope around my neck as I read it. Or, consider the last two Lauren Beukes novels: The Shining Girls and Broken Monsters. I’m only halfway through the latter but dang can she a) write and b) freak you the fuck out. For non-serial killer novels, while the film version didn’t spook me, the novel of The Exorcist is a pretty amazing read, and if you’ve never read it, well, now’s the time.
Anyway —
Your turn!
What books have really gotten under your skin?
Maybe it’s not a book, exactly, but a particular scene.
Let’s hear it.
(We’ll do movies next week, and maybe games after.)
Tiffany Reisz says:
I read Stephen King’s “The Langoliers” in the 5th grade. WHAT WERE MY PARENTS THINKING LETTING ME READ STEPHEN EFFING KING IN THE 5TH GRADE???
As you can see, I haven’t quite recovered.
October 13, 2014 — 6:53 PM
Ryan V says:
Nonfiction scares me way more than fiction because the horrifying scary things people have done to each other are REAL. Even historical fiction doesn’t quite have the same effect.
The Guns of August scared me to my bones and when I try to explain why it’s so frightening I feel tiny and ineffectual and useless all over again. It’s about the first month of the Great War (aka World War I), the failed negotiations that led to it and the first actions in the war itself. It scares me that everybody in positions of power would commit themselves to mass murder so obsessively, and blind themselves to the alternative, that there would be nearly no way to stop the inevitable.
Even scarier? The Guns of August only tells the start of four years of trenches and a dead generation. Sad, heartbreaking, hard to believe.
October 13, 2014 — 7:00 PM
OzFenric says:
How could I forget! “Under the Mountain” by Maurice Gee! I think it was this book that shaped my appreciation of horror – less of the slashy-slashy and much more towards the “This man is actually a horrible space parasite slug-creature in a human skin”. Great one for the kids.
October 13, 2014 — 7:09 PM
Thea says:
Needful Things by Stephen King
It’s not just about gore and murder. There are lots of books out there that cover mob violence, torture, sociopaths, etc… The key thing that makes this book terrifying is how the author captures the selfishness and the need to blame others underlying everything that happens, right up until the end, and how he makes us realize the extent to which we’ve allowed those traits to become ordinary parts of our lives/culture.
October 13, 2014 — 9:24 PM
portlandorange (@portlandorange) says:
I’ve read about half of King’s novels, and Needful Things is tied for my favorite. I read it right after I learned the distinction between plotting and pantsing from Chuck’s writing books. I usually find it alarming to picture me or anyone else pantsing their way through anything. But I thought King’s pantser approach really worked well in this one novel – both in his exploration of all the townspeople’s worst impulses and in the improvisation the police chief needed to try to face down the bad guy.
October 20, 2014 — 8:26 PM
Jim Reader says:
When I was in high school, a former teacher of mine handed me a copy of King’s “Salem’s Lot” – it must have been shortly after the paperback’s release. It was good, I enjoyed it. I lived in a small Central Texas town, and there are a lot of similarities between small towns everywhere, it struck a chord in me. Finished it, put it down.
Three weeks later I noticed I had, without really thinking about it, been watching all my neighbors to make sure I’d seen them in the daylight.
I laughed, and knew the book had really gotten to me.
October 13, 2014 — 9:31 PM
Natalie Maddalena says:
After reading Salem’s Lot I started wearing a crucifix. And I’m not catholic.
October 13, 2014 — 10:54 PM
JoelR says:
I was heavily into reading horror and suspense fiction in high school. I read copious amounts of Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Michael Crichton. Ironically, those all pale in comparison to The Black Angel by John Connolly. Years later, I still find concepts from it creeping into my mind like evil demon ninja monkeys intent on slaughtering and skull fucking any sense of calm and balance that I have managed to cobble together in my life.
I highly recommend Connolly’s work, skull-fuckery be damned.
October 13, 2014 — 9:41 PM
Robert S. Eilers says:
The Book of the Damned by D. A. Fowler has several scenes that are just disturbing, but what happened to the protagonist sent a chill down my spine so bad I’m feeling it twenty years later.
October 13, 2014 — 9:47 PM
Zara says:
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
October 13, 2014 — 9:52 PM
nerdboiwonder says:
Yes and yes. I actually had to sleep with the lights on after reading this one.
October 14, 2014 — 2:07 PM
curleyqueue says:
Am two-thirds through Something Wicked This Way Comes and though it’s not flat-out scary or gory, it is disturbing and Bradbury’s writing, at times more like poetry, has me entranced.
October 13, 2014 — 9:59 PM
incognitiously says:
I know many people have mentioned House of Leaves, but I have to add my vote — that book messed with my head so badly. I made the enormous mistake of reading it in a pre-war apartment block in NYC in early winter with all the noises and shadows that brings. I read it in 1998. AND IT STILL HAUNTS ME. A mindfuck of elegant and long-lasting proportions.
October 13, 2014 — 10:07 PM
Rachel says:
I have to admit, I’m not particularly a fan of horror, but I have read a few gems. One of my favorites is Allison Dickson’s short story “Vermin”. Its about bugs. It SQUICKED me OUT. Allie is a fabulous writer with great knack for mood and tone and voice, and since Vermin is an early work of her’s, she’s only gotten better.
My earliest favorite is Poe’s “The Tell-Tell Heart”, and my most recent is Flynn’s “Gone Girl”–the ominous ending just lingers in the mind and leaves behind dread and anger. I was impressed with that one.
October 13, 2014 — 10:07 PM
Patti Hermes says:
I don’t typically read horror, or even thrillers. So Candles Burning, by Tabitha King and Michael McDowell was a disturbing read, but I couldn’t put it down.
October 13, 2014 — 10:52 PM
Pam says:
Serpentine by Tommy Thompson…at my late father’s insistence. I was 18 years old and he thought I was too naïveté in the ways of the world. The consequence is it left me paranoid as hell. Nowadays I trust no one. It’s a wonder I agreed to live abroad with my husband in the U.A.E. for a year.
October 13, 2014 — 10:56 PM
Mozette says:
Okay… I agreed with ‘Amityville Horror’… that’s a given.
But the one story that really has had an effect on me – even now – was ‘The Bogeyman’ by Stephen King. It’s a short story out of ‘The Skeleton Crew’; and once I read it, I just couldn’t – and can’t – live with any of my wardrobe doors (or any other doors) left even an inch open anymore.
I once dated at nice guy who laughed at me about my ‘little problem’… I got him to read that story and he pointed to the wardrobe door: ‘Close it properly, could you?’ he asked me, ‘And um… can we leave the beside lamp on tonight?’
I closed the door, and smiled, ‘Sure.’
October 13, 2014 — 11:12 PM
Melissa Clare says:
Oh, dear God, “The Bogeyman”. Select SK short stories are the scariest things I’ve ever read. “The Bogeyman” is one (though it’s not in Skeleton Crew – I think it’s in Night Shift), “Gramma” (that one’s in Skeleton Crew) and “Crouch End” (forget what anthology that’s in). Any of these scare the living bejeezus out of me.
-MCW
October 14, 2014 — 5:54 PM
JWJ says:
Easy: 1984.
October 14, 2014 — 12:45 AM
mistererock says:
It didn’t frighten me when I read it…in 1984. But I re-read it a few years ago and it scares the hell out of me because it is has gone from fiction to foreshadowing.
October 14, 2014 — 1:31 AM
Tyner Gillies - Writer says:
One of the most disturbing books I ever read was “Apt Pupil” by Stephen King. I didn’t read it until I was in my 30’s but it gave me freaking nightmares.
October 14, 2014 — 2:08 AM
nickylouiseloveslife says:
I read Secrets room by Kim Faulks a little while ago now, and let me tell you that I still have nightmares when I think about it. It took me a week to be able to sleep properly after reading it It’s definitely a spine-tingling shivers down the back of your neck read!
P.s if you have any unresolved issues, RESOLVE THEM NOW!
October 14, 2014 — 4:44 AM
Matthew MacNish says:
Absolutely SCOWLER, by Daniel Kraus. (trigger warning: domestic abuse)
October 14, 2014 — 8:39 AM
plugav says:
H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” comes to mind. I know it sounds ridiculous, Lovecraftian themes being a massive cliche these days. But when I read that story, it was my first contact with this kind of faux-documentary horror. It felt chillingly real.
October 14, 2014 — 9:12 AM
Rick says:
Stephen Kings ‘Salem’s Lot. When I was a little kid the scene where the young boys mother rises up in the morgue and the priest can’t remember the Our Father to bless the tongue depressor crucifixes they are making scared the crap out of me so much, I threw the book across my room where it sat for three days under my bed. Some of H.P Lovecrafts gives me the creeps
October 14, 2014 — 11:06 AM
zeros83 says:
“Equoid”, by Charles Stross. It distubed me because Stross does a great work in depicting something that’s so ruthless in its action, so alien in its behavior… The actions of the “enemy force” at work are perfectly logic, devoid of any emotions or restrain whatsoever, to the point I really felt I was confronted by something that was “other than human”, and the sheer idea chilled me to the bone.
October 14, 2014 — 11:27 AM
emily anne says:
In recent years the one book that’s kept me awake and sleepless for a few nights running was Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill. I can’t even think about it without getting chills.
October 14, 2014 — 1:23 PM
Elyse says:
It terrified me. So original and so scary!
October 21, 2014 — 3:34 PM
Ron Mitchell says:
We just got in Kris Jenner’s Kardashian family cookbook here at the library I work at. That is pretty fucking scary.
October 14, 2014 — 1:33 PM
blujaybynight says:
“Phantoms” by Dean Koontz. Just for the nail-biting suspense. I think I read it in 6th grade or so. It was the first book I stayed up to read in one sitting. And then didn’t want to go to sleep.
Worth noting that the movie is equally frightening, but for entirely different reasons. Chiefly, the acting. Terrifyingly bad.
October 14, 2014 — 1:39 PM
Kyra Dune says:
It’s been a long time since a book scared or even freaked me out. The last book I can remember freaking me out gave me nightmares after I read it but it was so long ago I can’t remember much about the book except the fact that it gave me nightmares.
October 14, 2014 — 1:57 PM
Kate Jonez says:
I’m reading House of Leaves right now. Why oh why is a hallway and some math that doesn’t add up so freaking scary? A hallway.
October 14, 2014 — 2:08 PM
Scott says:
“Our Guys” by Bernard Lefkowitz. The true story of the teenage high school football team that lured a mentally retarded girl into a basement in New Jersey in 1989, and then proceeded to rape and sodomize her. But that’s not the scary part. The real horror begins when the narrative picks up with the town citizens, and how they wanted to turn a blind eye because of how important football was to the town. So scary for a father of girls, this book turned me off from high school (and college, and professional) sports for a while.
http://www.amazon.com/Our-Guys-Bernard-Lefkowitz/dp/0375702695/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1413311429&sr=8-1&keywords=our+guys+lefkowitz
October 14, 2014 — 2:40 PM
janinmi says:
In roughly chronological order…
One of my English teachers in high school was fond of showing short fiction-to-film flix designed for school use. The two films I remember best are “Bartleby the Scrivener” (Melville’s “I would prefer not to…” ranks right up there with “I t’s beyond my control” [from “Dangerous Liaisons” film] for shuddery one-liners) and “The Lottery” (Shirley Jackson). I never read the Melville or Jackson stories. The film for “The Lottery” scared the daylights out of me because the woman playing the female lead looked way too much like my mom’s best friend at the time, one of our neighbors.
Around the same time, I was introduced to Ambrose Bierce’s fiction in HS, which led me to my mom’s copy of The Collected Short Stories of Edgar Allan Poe (which I still own) and … “The Cask of Amontillado.” A third shuddery one-liner lives in this one: “For the love of God, Montresor!”
Saving the best for last: Jr. year of college, I took an Intro to SF & F class which included some horror as well (probably because the instructor, the late Robert Stallman, had a trilogy coming out in that genre at the time). One of the books on the reading list was Graham Masterton’s Charnel House. I started that book at 8 p.m. on a Friday night (report due the following Monday, as I recall) and did not put it down until I finished it around 2 a.m. the following morning. No sleepies for me until I’d read the last word, I knew that for sure.
Among recent reads, Jon Bassoff’s 2nd novel Factory Town was so disturbing I had to read just a few pages at a time. No bailing on this one: review assignment (Foreword Reviews), and I’d picked it. The psychic pain (as in mental, not paranormal) in this novel is cranked to 11. Readers beware: for some, the entire book requires a trigger warning…for *every* page. ::shudder:: Brilliantly written, utterly draining.
October 14, 2014 — 6:53 PM
avpackard says:
I can’t think of a book that has ever really scared me. American Psycho is probably the most disturbingly violent book, but I found most of the other parts to be hilarious so that probably doesn’t count. Almost any non-fiction book about Ted Bundy gives me nightmares. Freak. Also Jason Moss’ The Last Victim is pretty horrible. The point is, at least in my reading ventures, reading about the real things that humans do to each other is much more horrifying than make believe.
October 14, 2014 — 9:17 PM
Jesslyn Hendrix says:
It by Stephen King, hands down. Ugh. Now I’m all freaked out all over again.
October 14, 2014 — 10:10 PM
Kate Loveton says:
I enjoyed Beukes ‘The Shining Girls’ – I’ll have to check out ‘Broken Monsters.’ I am currently reading The Strain trilogy.
Scariest book I ever read? Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ – I read it when I was 14, and was afraid to turn the lights out and go to sleep.
October 14, 2014 — 10:41 PM
jodilee says:
The Horned Ones: Cornucopia by Christine Morgan. The first time I’ve ever had a physical reaction to reading a novel… took me forever to edit it because I’d jump away from the desk in a claustrophobic panic attack. I’ve now read it three times since, and every time, same reaction. I think it may even be my Halloween weekend choice this year, lol.
October 15, 2014 — 3:17 PM
Wickedjulia says:
The Handmaid’s Tale written by Margaret Atwood. I read it when I was 16 on possibly the worst day of my teenage life while being forced to wait for someone to make a decision. It dovetailed into how powerless I felt at that moment and gave me nightmares.
October 15, 2014 — 3:47 PM
David Simon says:
The Shining. I was maybe 13 when I read it, home from school in the feverish grip of a horrible flu that was going around. I couldn’t sleep, so I just kept reading, alone and half out of my mind with fear. Cruddy, by Lynda Barry. Not horror at all, but the stuff Roberta, the main character, goes through left me in a puddle of despair and fright. Finally, a short story I found in some little paperback anthology by an author I had never heard of: The Vertical Ladder by William Sansom. It’s about a teenage boy who climbs a storage tower ladder. *That’s all that happens.* Scared the bejesus out of me, and has stayed with me for the 40 or so years since I read it. Oh, and I agree on The Exorcist. Yes, the movie is scary, but the book, with its clinical language and cold distance, is utterly terrifying.
October 15, 2014 — 4:14 PM
Sharon Fummerton says:
For me, the quintessential ghost story is Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House”. I read it in my early teens, and it’s still a favourite of mine. And, I do prefer the black & white film version with the late Julie Harris as Eleanor to the more recent one with the CG effects. I love these lines which are found in the opening paragraph, and the end of the closing paragraph: “Hill House itself, not sane, stood against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, its walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
A second choice for scary for me is William Peter Blatty’s sequel to “The Exorcist”, titled “Legion”. I enjoyed the movie, but the script omitted the underlying theme involving “a neurologist who can no longer bear the pain life inflicts on its victims”, which I found fascinating. I read “The Exorcist” two days after seeing the film in a packed theatre in Vancouver, December 27, 1972 (or 1973?). It scared the daylights out of me because I went expecting something like the Rank Organization movie releases with the likes of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. What made it so scary for me was the idea of someone being attacked from an evil, invisible entity from without. The fact that a child was its target was even more frightening. I’ve seen this film a few times, especially with the footage that was considered too much for viewers back in 1972. This may sound very strange to you, but I have come to regard this film as a love story. Not romantic love, but parental (Mom goes the limit to try and save her daughter), friendship (personal assistant and the German couple hired as household staff stand firmly with the mother in this horrifying struggle) and the self-sacrificing love of the two priests (the elder one having already faced this demon before, thus weakening his heart, and the younger who commands Pazuzu to take him and then hurls himself out the bedroom window to fall the length of that long, cement stairway to death on the street below).
Best regards,
S.L. Fummerton (author of one whole novel titled “Thaumaturge”)
sfummerton@shaw.ca
October 15, 2014 — 4:29 PM
Aphotic Ink says:
“Hard Times”, by E. L. Doctorow. I picked it up thinking “Oh, this will be a pulpy old Western, cool.”
It is a Western with all the visceral brightness of pulp fiction, yes. It is old, yes.
It pole-axed me with a kind of miserable horror.
For short fiction: “The Screwfly Solution” by Tiptree, and “Gestella”, by Susan Palwick. Although the latter made me cry as well.
October 15, 2014 — 10:57 PM
alana52 says:
A Tintin story, by Herge: The Seven Crystal Balls, when they’re holed up overnight in a big house during a summer lightning storm, and they all dream the same dream: that the ancient Incan mummy of Rascar Capac has come alive. Scariest damn thing ever, aged 7 or 8.
October 16, 2014 — 12:44 AM
Melissa Osburn says:
There was a short story in an anthology I read many years ago. I can’t remember the name of the story. It involved, if memory serves me right, a demonic baby that shadowed the main character. It was so disturbing that I couldn’t finish the story.
Stephen King’s “The Road Virus Heads North” was another one the scared me.
October 16, 2014 — 7:42 AM
Dave says:
Your short story about the baby sounds like Harlan Ellison. I can’t place the name at the moment either, but yeah creeped me out.
October 19, 2014 — 9:35 AM
Melissa Osburn says:
Thanks, Dave! 🙂
October 22, 2014 — 12:59 PM
mannixk says:
1984 and A Handmaid’s Tale are two my favourite books of all time. And so very terrifying.
But as for something that really scared me, to the point that I kept thinking about it long after I closed the book, it would have to be Stephen King’s short story collection Full Dark, No Stars. The story “A Good Marriage” is my favourite. I just found out this has been made into a movie, which could either be horrible or great. Nothing could be scarier than imagining yourself as the wife in that story though…
October 16, 2014 — 2:54 PM
Rio says:
Definitely House of Leaves.
October 16, 2014 — 7:20 PM
Kurt Bali says:
Desperation by Stephen King. The scene where he/it is walking up the stairs with the family locked in the jail cell. King built the suspense like the master he is. Literally spine chilling.
October 16, 2014 — 8:00 PM
Himani says:
Both of these have been mentioned but…IT by Stephen King was one of the few books that actually freaked me out while reading it. And THE HANDMAID’S TALE by Margaret Atwood disturbed me — and still does today.
October 20, 2014 — 7:37 AM
tedra says:
It would probably have to be Something Wicked This Way comes. Made me a Bradbury fan for life though and let me me know that I didn’t have to write cutesy girl stuff. Recently I read Heaven is For Real and that freaked me out. Ghost and other realms, it just freaks me out.
October 20, 2014 — 8:17 AM
Teddy Fuhringer says:
‘Darkfall’ by Stephen Laws. The idea of a mass disappearance (like Roanoke) is scary enough. Add to that being trapped in a building that will kill you if any part of your unprotected body touches any part of the building’s structure, walls, floor, anything. Then the whole scene with the corpse falling through the roof of the greenhouse. What terrified me wasn’t the corpse itself, it was HOW the corpse got there. Shudder. A truly messed up story. I loved every minute of it.
October 20, 2014 — 8:26 AM
coolerbs says:
I am incredibly late to this party, but I actually wrote a whole article about the scariest book I have ever read, over at my blog. You can see it here: http://coolerbs.com/2014/10/18/the-scariest-book-i-have-ever-read/
But if you don’t feel like reading the whole thing, my answer is: ‘Unwind’ by Neal Shustermen, a dystopian book about a world were children can be pseudo-aported from ages 13 to 18.
October 20, 2014 — 2:40 PM
gaeliceyes says:
Neil Gaiman’s “Ocean at the End of the Lane” had a couple of scenes when the “scary thing” (that is a technical term here as I’m not sure what she really WAS) went full-on crazy and the description actually gave me chills. In an anthology of his short stories, “Fragile Things”, there is one story about a cat vs. and undefined evil that just wigs me out. I haven’t read it for years, but periodically it will pop into my head and give me the creeps….
October 20, 2014 — 5:18 PM
mangacat201 says:
You’re referring to ‘The Price’, which I also mentioned here. That story just gave me the creeps when I read it.
October 21, 2014 — 1:05 AM
david says:
The scariest book I ever read was read to me by my 7th grade (I think) English teacher. I think it was actually a short story, not a book, and I don’t remember the name. I remember vividly (and I have a terrible memory) it was about spiders and a boy who got lost in a jungle when a torrential rainstorm started and he fell into a large hole in the earth. He wasn’t hurt but as the rain poured in, the water level rose and the huge forest spiders floated to highest ground to stay dry – which was him. He was covered with these huge bird-eating spiders and could do nothing about it until the rain stopped and the water drained.
Just today (over 40 years later) I saw a picture of a “puppy-sized South American Goliath birdeater” and thought of that story read to me long ago.
October 20, 2014 — 5:41 PM
writingthroughthebody says:
No question: The Shining – the book far more than the film. Especially, the scene where he finds the decaying woman in the bathtub. It was the sound of her feet on the floor that did it. Read it 30+ years ago and was afraid to go home for lunch in the middle of the day.
October 20, 2014 — 6:04 PM
portlandorange (@portlandorange) says:
Sorry to be a week late to the party! I’m adding two works on vampires that I didn’t see above.
I found it very hard to stomach the serial-killer aspects of Jeanne Kalogridis’s Diaries of the Family Dracul trilogy. But her supernatural descriptions are amazing, and the themes of What Zsuzsanna Understands and What Zsuzsanna Becomes Able To Do are incredibly rewarding to follow through the last book.
Joe Hill’s NOS4A2 is the only book in years that I needed to put down for a week or two when I was halfway through. I love it that he says in the acknowledgments that Tabitha King spoke with him bluntly about his original ending. I wish I knew what it was, because I think he knocked it out of the park with his last two chapters.
October 20, 2014 — 7:27 PM