Stephen King doesn’t always scare me but when he gets me he gets me good. In one of his books of short stories, there’s a story about a man who traveled to the moon or some other planet. Anyway, he gets these golden eyes on his hand, and they make him kill someone. They hate everyone. So he cuts his hand off…and some time later they appear on his chest. In a circle. I’m getting chills just relating it. It was the image of those golden eyes, blinking, that got to me.
Another Stephen King short story - a finger comes out of the drain hole and only this one guy sees it. And it gets longer and longer, and his wife never sees it…he finally takes a chainsaw to it or something, and there’s blood everywhere but only he can see it. I can only too easily imagine myself turning my back and the finger wrapping around my long hair and pulling…
An Edgar Allen Poe - The TellTale Heart. Poe is another that’s often not scary, but this one always gets to me.
How about The Shining? The whole book didn’t scare me but the corpse in the bathroom had silver eyes. The eyes freak me out.
I can’t remember others off-hand, but I’m sure there’s more. You guys?
Salem’s Lot freaked me out. I was probably about fourteen when I read it. The scene with little boy in his room, and the vampire comes and taps on his window, and he rips the cross off his Dracula or Wolfman model set–that one freaked me out especially. I had nightmares for a couple months afterwards about my family and everyone I knew being turned into vampires and I was the only one left, so I had to destroy everybody. I still have those dreams occasionally, and they still scare me.
Come to think of it, Pet Sematary gave me the same sorts of dreams, only with evil zombies instead. The only Stephen King book I’ve read since that has been On Writing, which did not give me nightmares. Those would have been some weird dreams–armies of undead typewriters coming to strangle my family with typewriter ribbons and to torment them with correcting fluid, I suppose.
I was in my dorm room at school trying to read the Amityville Horror and having to stop, turn on every light, the TV and sit shaking for an hour reading Mad Magazine to get my mind off of it.
My grandmother likes to read trashy novels and frequently unloaded some choice pieces of her library on my family.
I don’t know what the title of this book is but I read it when I was 9 as part of a recent grandma unloading. It was a story about a busload of kidnapped children from an affluent suburb. The scarring for life part is when the book focused on the psychotics who kidnapped them. The leader used to punish another member of the team by using a carrot peeler on his penis. He recruited the crazy chick to his team by supplying her with a lesbian at the mental hospital they were imprisoned in. Then, one of the fathers of a kidnapped child had extended chapters devoted to how he seduced a neighborhood teen.
One day, I spied a book called “The Story of O” on my parent’s bookshelf. I thought it was a biography of O. Henry because I was 11. My God, how wrong I was…
Anyone else read “The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer”? My parents forbade me to get it so, being a young teenager, I bought it and hid it. I used to read it at night when everyone else was asleep. To this day, Bob haunts my dreams.
Check out the photo on the dust jacket, in the link. That man might have been the nicest guy in the world, but I doubt it. I loved the book but couldn’t keep it in the house.
It’s about a diptheria epidemic in a small town, and how the town constable/funeral director copes. Or not. The epidemic isn’t enough – a wildfire is approaching the town.
(If you read the link, don’t read the Publisher’s Weekly review – it’s full of spoilers.)
I agree with The Painted Bird. It’s the only real book I’ve ever thrown in the trash, destroyed. There may be redeeming social value in there, but you have to look too hard to find it.
I had a cousin with a book collection that included “Story of O” , The Pearl, and de Sade stuff. Took me a while to get over those. yuck.
As for horror, Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado” was just, well, too horrible for words for me. Nightmare doesn’t begin to describe it.
When I was ten years old, I came across a raggedy paperback collection of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories that was mouldering in the garage. I read the book, and it scared the bejabbers out of me. For some reason, the references to bizarre alien geometries (and the arcane horrors that emerge from them) obsessed me. I was a weird kid already, and Lovecraft made me a lot weirder.
Nope - I read it in HS, a used copy I’d gotten somewhere. I gave it to a friend after I read it - she read it and tried to give it back, saying she didn’t want it in her house. I wasn’t taking it home - I wanted her to keep it when I gave it to her because I didn’t want it in my house! So I left it in the hallway to the band room. That thing was not going home with me.
Tobacco Road, by Erskine Caldwell. Especially that bit where the teenage daughter grovels in the dirt for a couple of turnips, IIRC. The novel fuels all those nightmarish stereotypes about inbred, uneducated, debased, and basically uncivilized rural poor.
That, and the tortuous executions in James Clavell’s Shogun – the last and most ghastly one being that of Toranaga’s biggest political enemy, who gets it in the neck, but slooowly.
Glad I’m not the only one who gets freaked out by those kinds of things. I know better than to read certain things or play certain video games closer to an hour before bed!!!
**Lord of the Flies ** had that effect on me when I read it, I think I was about 13, so the same age as some of the boys on the island. The ending was just devastating, it was so dark. I had deeply cynical feelings for many years afterwards, until other experiences began to outweigh this one.
I read John Wyndham’s *The Kraken Wakes * when I was about 12, I suppose. I was horrified by the scene where the sea-tanks attack Escondida, especially the bits where:
[spoiler]- the women is dragged from the upper floor by her hair
the man is torn in two
the description of the trapped people’s arms and legs flailing wildly and uselessly as the mass of tentacles rolls back to the beach[/spoiler]
I had nightmares for days afterwards. Even now the thought of that scene makes me shudder.
The Wasp Factory, by Iain Banks; the whole damn book creeped me out and has stuck with me.
For those who haven’t read it, it’s about:A highly disfunctional child who gleefully, yet casually, murders several of his close relatives (who are also children)
I still have those dreams occasionally, and they still scare me.