It is October. It is the time of skeletons, Jack-o-Lanterns, and animated scarecrows. It is the time of haunted DMVs, and jars full of teeth, and vampire driving slowly in the left lane. It is the time of zombie preschoolers with snot-slick hands running toward you at top speed, and the ghost of your disappointed father, and Miley Cyrus hosting Saturday Night Live.
IT IS THE SCARIEST MONTH, OOOOOOOOOOO.
Ahem.
Whatever.
Your job:
Recommend a scary book. Just one. And not your own.
Tell us why it scared you.
Here, let me recommend one: LIBRARY AT MOUNT CHAR. Scott Hawkins. I don’t even know what the fuck this book is. It’s like if Hogwarts was in America, and instead of it being a school it was actually a weirdo spirit cult, so basically it’s nothing like Harry Potter (though maybe it’s Harry Potter by way of Clive Barker?) but whatever. It has some of the trappings of urban fantasy, but it tells the story as if it’s horror — so, while it still sometimes feels like urban fantasy, it rejects some of the silliness of that subgenre and goes right for the jugular. It’s a terrifying, weird, funny, disgusting book. It features a fascinating cast of inhumans. I adored it.
YOUR TURN, GHOULFRIENDS
JMP says:
The Red Tree by Caitlin Kiernan: first book that truly scared me since The Haunting of Hill House… has that same eeriness where the terror/haunting is never fully defined. Too bad the cover looks like a shite YA novel.
The Croning by Laird Barron: weird horror meets The Great Gatsby… along with the Rumplestiltskin story.
October 9, 2015 — 11:09 AM
Linda Hooper says:
Alex Alexander’s ‘Ghost on the lake’ was one that really freaked me out. The story was original with fresh ideas that totally threw me off. I can usually predict a lot of what is coming next in your average ghost story but the unpredictable nature of this story really kept me on edge. I thought it was very clever and wonderfully written. An absolute must-read for fans of the supernatural and mystery/suspense.
http://www.alexalexanderbooks.com
October 10, 2015 — 3:01 PM
RachelJeanDevlin says:
20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill. I’ve read it several times.
October 10, 2015 — 3:36 PM
tracikenworth says:
took by mary downing
October 11, 2015 — 7:24 PM
Scott Dyson says:
The two I thought of have already been mentioned: DRAWING BLOOD by Poppy Z. Brite, and THE GIRL NEXT DOOR by Jack Ketchum. Ketchum’s book was so disturbing. As for a short story, LETTER TO MY EX by J. Michael Major (I think it’s in a Spatterlands anthology) was bone-chilling. And I remember a passage describing a person drowning that I found horrific, but I can’t seem to recall the title of the book it was in. I think it was a Nancy Holder book, but it’s not listed on Amazon.
October 12, 2015 — 4:53 PM
shoesalaart says:
So I started checking out the books on this list, and OMG! Royal Jelly was amazing; Through the Woods was so beautiful and terrifying; Bird Box scary beyond words; and The Ruins will make you rethink vines. I just finished Mount Char and I was blown away! I wanted more…
October 24, 2015 — 11:37 PM
bostonfoxed says:
This thread is probably played out by now, but I really enjoyed NOS4A2 by Joe Hill. It’s about people with magic powers and one of them is a serial kidnapper who stays young by draining out the humanity of children, leaving behind horrible little sociopathic vampires who hang out in the villain’s mindscape…
…
A Christmas theme park called Christmasland. Just when you thought it wasn’t unnerving enough.
(The title is a play on Nosferatu, obviously, and also the license plate of the villain’s totem. In case that needed answering.)
October 25, 2015 — 3:21 AM
bostonfoxed says:
Oh! And last year I read Ligotti’s Teatro Grottesco, which seems to be a collection of stories, but about halfway through you start to get the vague uneasy sense that there’s a meta-plot he’s only hinting at until the end. Well worth reading twice, once you’ve got it the first time.
October 25, 2015 — 3:30 AM