Johnny Got His Gun freaked me out badly. Sad, scary book.
I’ll agree that “The Boogeyman” is one of the scariest things I’ve ever read. Now that I think of it, I haven’t read it since I became a father, and maybe I shouldn’t.
Michael Shea’s “The Autopsy” is also damn freaky.
You guys already mentioned the Stephen King things that scared the crap out of me as a kid (gee, thanks, I’d forgotten the Gramma story. Glare.), but have you read Neil Gaiman’s children’s book Coraline?! Good lord. Every time I think I’m too old to be terrified by something in a book I go and read something that proves me wrong.
But the awful thing is, it’s supposed to be a kid’s book!
My son and I were almost through with Coraline around midnight. I turned the page to see a picture of that. We both didn’t sleep well that night. Brrrrrr.
Have you been to the website? He does a reading of the first chapter. Very nice voice.
I don’t really find most horror novels scary like you’re supposed to. But Mine by Robert McCammon and Lost by Gary Devon are truly disturbing. “Monkey Shines” by Stephen King is actually fairly scary too.
The scariest “non-fiction” book I’ve ever read is Passing Strange by Joseph Citro. YMMV on that one.
[sub] if anyone says house of leaves I’m going to laugh at them. I won’t point it out in the thread, but I will be laughing.[/sub]
I’m not sure why, exactly, but the Stephen King short story about the kids out on the raft in a lake trying not to be killed by this weird oil spot looking creature. Something about that story just got to me.
non-fiction wise, I’d say Anatomy of Motive by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker. It’s all about what drives serial killers/mass-murderers etc. it’s chilling.
I read Cujo when I was 11 (yes I read novels that early). Scared the bejeebus out of me. Apparently it’s a good thing I didn’t read The Shining at that age.
5-HT I read that one too. The Raft from Skeleton Crew. When I was a teen I used to have a friend who lived on a lake and we would swim out to a small anchored dock and sit out there and goof off. Thought about that story more than once sitting out there.
So I’m not the only one who was unable to sleep with the lights out or the closet door shut after reading Stephen King’s “The Boogeyman”? I first read this story in 6th grade. The kid sitting next to me in math said, “Hey, you gotta read this” and passed it over. That was my first, and scariest, Stephen King experience.
Scariest novel? Believe it or not, for me it was 1984 by George Orwell. It gave me an incredibly vivid nightmare that I was Winston Smith. I woke up, got a drink of water and thought “thank god that’s over.” Went back to sleep and the dream started up again. :rolleyes: It was bad.
Well, another King story got me. The Mist. It just creeped me out. And Cujo. And The Shining. And 'Salems Lot. And It, well certain parts of It. King can scare me silly sometimes.
Another book that really got me was “Damnation Game” by Clive Barker.
Slee
That’s “The October Game.” The high school choir director was fond of reading that one to his classes every year on Halloween.
It really only works once, though. 
Red Dragon by Thomas Harris. If you’ve only read Silence of the Lambs, or heaven forbid, Hannibal, Red Dragon makes those books look about as scary as Encyclopedia Brown mysteries.
Supernatural stuff, okay it’s scary. But the sociopathic killer of Red Dragon – that could happen! It does happen! Eek!
I read it of course when Mr. Del was out of town and I was home alone. I didn’t sleep a wink that night.
For short stories, Mehitabel already mentioned the one I think is scariest, Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains.” When we read this in school, I was already deep into my Fear Of Atomic Weapons phase. This put me over the edge.
Short story: Lukundoo by Edward Lucas White
Collection of short stories: King’s Skeleton Crew
Novel: * The Exorcist*
Your mum was right, Blatty did base the novel on an actual exorcism that happened in a Maryland suburb of Washington DC in the late 1940’s. Back in the mid 1990’s a book came out detailing the story of the actual exorcism, but I can’t remember the title for the life of me. It was a good read and had it’s share of scary moments.
One big difference was that in the case of the real exorcism, the possessed was a boy, not a girl.
Richard Preston’s non-fiction, specifically The Hot Zone and The Demon in the Freezer. I read the latter last spring shortly after the war in Iraq began, and I didn’t sleep much for a week.
“Horror”-type stories never really scared; human behavior at its most brutal, however, frightens the living shit out of me. I got a copy of Thomas Keneally’s “Schindler’s List” this past X-mas, read it in a day, and had the most horrific nightmares about Nazis for the next week.
Nearly the same thing, with time and place changes, happened after I read a book about the Rwandan genocide called “We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families” by Phillip Gourevitch, which to me is still the most shocking and brutal thing I’ve ever read and, to this day, is the only book which has caused me to cry.
Getting away from non-fiction…the murder scene in Doestoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”, which I naively read at 2 in the morning when no one else was home, prevented a night’s sleep. It is an absolutely chilling read.
Short story: “The Wendigo” by Algernon Blackwood. To this day I occasionally find myself glancing up into the sky on clear, cold nights and shivering for reasons other than the temperature.
Most anything by Arthur Machen is a close second.
I’m not a big horror reader, but I’ve found a few things that made me sleep with the light on.
In Gary Jennings’ Raptor…
When they sneak into the camp to rescue the pregnant Roman lady and her son from the Huns. Her husband gets captured and a Hun slices a hole in his belly and rapes him through it. I didn’t sleep for a week.
I’ve read 80% of the stuff mentioned so far in this thread, and for sheer creepiness, one of my current books, Bless The Child, by Cathy Cash Spellman has them beat. Technically speaking, Bless The Child is not the best book in the world. Most of these other books and stories have much more professional polish than Bless The Child. What these other books don’t have, though, is the ability to really disturb me. Of course, Bless The Child is in large part about an innocent little girl who is in considerable peril, and when that’s done right it can really, really get to me, especially now that I have a little one of my own. I actually put this novel down the other night because it was starting to get to me, something no other book has compelled me to do.
Now that I’ve said all that, watch the rest of the book suck . . .
HDS mentioned Johnny Got His Gun. This is a book on my to-read list I have yet to get to. I did, however, see the movie when I was in high school, and that, my friends, was some seriously disturbing shit. Wow.
Story that I read when I was in the 6th grade, but I don’t remember who wrote it, or the name.
It was about two older ladies (or they seemed older to me, when I was in the 6th grade) who were walking home from a gathering of some sort. At some point they parted ways. As “Vicky” was walking home (I’m assigning this name for the purposes of this summary), she got the feeling of someone following her. She started getting more and more paranoid, hearing footsteps behind her. She finally gets to her house on a dead run, and manages to get the door locked.
The last line still sticks in my head: “And, in the darkness, she heard someone clear their throat.”
Shivers
Still gets me. If anyone knows what story this is, I’d love to know, so that I can re-read it.
The two worst books which immediately came to mind have been mentioned (The Shining & The Hot Zone). A story I originally followed a link to, from the SDMB no less, is probably the scariest thing I have ever read on-line. It fell apart at the end, but it didn’t ease my fear at all anyhow. I read it after the SO had gone to bed, and I was so frightened, I actually thought about waking him up. heh What a dork.