In Dennis Etchison’s collection, The Dark Country, there’s a story called (IIRC) “They Only Come Out at Night.” Read it and you’ll never want to stop at a roadside rest stop in the Arizona desert at night again.
The first thing that jumps to mind is Roald Dahl’s short (very short) story In the Ruins. Disturbing!
I don’t remember old young I was when I read Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter, but the idea that normal people weren’t safe in their homes, and that normal people can turn into monsters took away my youthful feeling of security.
StG
Harlan Ellison’s short story, “I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream.”
Nasty bit of work.
Holy cow. Disturbing is an understatement!
I can’t remember the name of the story or the author, but it was about a Jewish mother, daughter, and toddler during the Holocaust. The mother was hiding the toddler in a shawl - the Nazi guards didn’t know she was there, and as long as the toddler had her shawl she was quiet and content. One night the older sister got cold and swiped the shawl. When the toddler woke up and found it gone she started wailing, the guard came with a bayonet, and…well. I hate stories where bad things happen to children.
My librarian mother gave me a book of short stories for children. In one of the stories, a little boy befriends a little girl who always wears a green ribbon around her neck. They grow up, fall in love, and get married. Through it all, the girl always wears the green ribbon despite the boy’s pleas that she take it off.
On their wedding night, however, she finally agrees to take off the ribbon…
and her head falls off.
As an eight-year-old, this was just chilling. Haunted me for years.
I’ve read that one with the green ribbon, and now it’s really bugging me because I can’t place the author. The only one that comes to mind is R.L. Stine.
I can’t remember the title of the book or the author, so we can suffer together.
I don’t remember the author, but I remember the story… wasn’t it in a compilation of stories, in a book called something like “In a Dark Dark Room”? And the girl’s name was Jenny… I think.
Lots of Stephen King in here. If I may add another…When I was 10 or 11 I read The Tommyknockers. I had to talk myself out of the idea that I was going to be abducted by aliens in my sleep for quite a while.
“Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” I think. There were some pretty screwed up stories in there. Mine was the one where a bride and her maids of honor are playing hide-and-go-seek before a wedding, and the bride disappears. They find her body years later locked in a chest in the attic, where apparently she had attempted to hide and been unable to free herself.
It’s pathos that gets me, and it had to get me young. The chill from horror passes. I even ‘got’ the comedy in American Psycho (skim read only).
In Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids there’s a scene: Shortly after the blindness pandemic. There’s anarchy and people are starting to starve. The narrator spots a man hurrying down the street and clutching two large tins to himself, and a tin opener. The tins’ label says ‘paint’.
I read that, years ago. The book in itself didn’t freak me out, but when he describes the baby’s brain that was full of maggots
I threw the book away from my chair. I was physically repulsed by the text, not even American Psycho had that affect on me. I like Iain Banks, but always aproach him with caution.
I remember hearing about people fainting at readings of Chuck Palaunik’s short story “Guts.” I always thought “pansies”…until I read it. Oh my god that’s a disturbing story. I’m getting squicky thinking about it now, and I can’t even type out a spoiler, I’m so icked out. Google it if you want; it’s online somewhere.
shudder
I also had that book, and that particular story was the only one that really scared me. I always had a fear, as a kid, of enclosed spaces and of being trapped inside a confining space. When I was about 7 years old I read a book in which there was a chapter discussing a Soviet prison, and it went into great detail about this tiny solitary-confinement cell known as “the box” which was not wide enough to lie down in, and not tall enough to stand up in. The thought of it scared the shit out of me for years.
I read *Oliver Twist * when I was 11. Scary damn book for a kid.
I found “The Color Out of Space” in a science fiction anthology back in early adolescense. It scared the hell out of me.
Since then, I’ve read many works from “The Lovecraft Mythos.” But I’ve never again attempted anything by The Man Himself.
Could it be Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark? That was a favorite in third grade or so.
In one of those Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror books there was a story, I want to say it was called “House Taken Over”, about this couple who lives in this big house, and it’s slowly forced them out of most of the house. The story is about the night they have to leave. It really bothered the hell out of me as a teenager.
Oh yeah. Stephen King wrote a rest stop story too. No rest stops at night. Ever. Pee in a bottle or something.
The Stick Woman by Edward Lee will make you wary of your own children.
I’m another one that can read Stephen King all night long, shut down the lights and sleep like a baby.
The one book that really scared me was “The Auctioneer” by Joan Samson. I haven’t picked it back up in some time. I have some unresolved issues from childhood. 
The book has kids being taken away from their parents and being “sold” at what the Auctioneer called private adoptions - I was adopted myself and was always afraid someone would take me away from my parents.
Plus, the rest of the book is just downright CREEPY.