Books that traumatized you as a child

[Ranchoth]

@Lissla_Lissar

Did anyone else read John Bellairs when they were kids? The Mummy, the Will, and the Crypt, The Curse of the Sorcerer’s Skull, and (oh, kill me now) The Lamp From the Warlock’s Tomb?

Oh! How could I ever forget him…or the Edward Gorey cover illustrations.

Only one of the books in the series still brings any memories to mind, though…the quintessential traumatizing children’s book, The Eyes of the Killer Robot.

I was even able to find the excerpt from the inside cover—most of which is just as I remember it, after all these years:

[spoiler]*A man was sitting on the bench – a man Johnny had never seen before. He wore baggy, dusty overalls and a faded plaid shirt, and he had a big mop of straw-colored hair. The bunch of pieweed stalks fell from his numb fingers, and he took a couple of shuffling steps forward. And then, as Johnny watched, the man stood up. He took his hands away from his face and he stumbled. Johnny gasped in terror – the man had no eyes. Streaks of blood ran down from empty black sockets.

“They took my eyes,” the man moaned. “They took my eyes.”

Johnny opened and closed his mouth, and made little whimpering noises. He shut his eyes tight to block out this horrible vision, and when he opened them again a second later, the man was gone.*[/spoiler]

:eek:

Now that…is a children’s book.

[Momofgirls]

@Elendil_s_Heir

That reminds me… I remember a book I read when I was ten years old or so. It was about a little kid who is staying at a small hotel - more like a B&B - over the summer. ISTR it was his uncle’s or aunt’s hotel, and he was helping out, but got bored and started prying into the personal lives of some of the guests. Turns out one of them was an alien in human shape but who was all blue (dunno how he concealed that from everyone). There was a real air of menace to the story. Don’t know how it ended.

Insert your own Blue Man Group or Andorian joke here.

That was The Blue Man by Kin Platt. My fourth grade teacher read that out loud to us for a couple weeks, and it really freaked me out (but I also loved it). I found it at a used book store a couple years ago but haven’t re-read it. I need to do that now, and maybe pass it on to my kids.

[matt_mcl]

In grade 9, we were obliged to read All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. For those who don’t know, it’s a horribly realistic account of a German soldier’s life in the trenches of World War I, complete with ghastly mutilations, explosions, shredded corpses, dehumanization, shell shock and mental instability, etc., all described in lavish detail.

I bet it was bad enough for the other grade 9 kids to read it, but I was a year and a half younger than them (I skipped a grade and was born in October) and rather, um, delicate. I really think that book fucked me up in some pretty creative ways.

I had to read lots of other depressing books – 1984, Lord of the Flies, The Grapes of Wrath, The Stone Angel – but I don’t recall one ever putting me through the wringer like that one. Horresco referens.

[choie]

Great thread! I can think of four books that stand out as freaking me out the most.

First were Guinness Book of World Records and The Book of Lists. The World Records primarily for the picture of the guy with the longest fingernails, the man who was hit by lightning 17 times, and the man who caught hiccups from slaughtering a pig and never stopped. That last one has ensured that every time I get the hiccups I’m a little afraid that I’ll have them forever. (Fortunately I also have a sure-fire cure that works on me every time … so far. Oh God, I’ve just jinxed myself, haven’t I?)

The Book of Lists’s entry for “Ten cases of spontaneous combustion” is responsible for my childhood terror of being burned alive, which wasn’t helped when I realized that my favorite fuzzy pink nightgown caused static sparks I could see in the dark.

Also there’s John Steinbeck’s The Red Pony. There was a scene, at least to my vague recollection, in which the pony was born and is described as being covered in blood. Naturally this meant that every time I saw the cover to that book (with, natch, a red pony) I envisioned the pony being red because of the blood. Hey thanks, Steinbeck.

But the biggest case of a book messing my shit up was the 1970s paperback version of Agatha Christie’s Evil Under the Sun, which depicts some kind of tattered, white voodoo doll lying on the beach. And OMG I just found it via Google… here it is, this horrible horrible thing! Seeing that cover as a 10-year-old, thanks to my oldest sister who collected all the Christie books, gave me my one and only night terror, whereupon Chava from Fiddler on the Roof was killed and ended up under the sea on the sand, visible only as a white, doll-like creature, who suddenly arose from the dead to drag me down into the water. I woke up with tremors and had to have smelling salts to calm down, I kid you not.

Yeah, I was a weird, frightened little kid.

P.S. no, I have no idea why I was so afraid of Chava from Fiddler on the Roof, of all fictional characters! That’s a whole 'nother thread.

[appleciders]

Prince Caspian. What, you spend two books making me love Peter and then kick him out for good? Screw that. I refused to read any of the other books in that series for at least six months afterward.

[Unauthorized_Cinnamon]

@Quint

I was often freaked out by books I read as a child, but the honour of “first book to really scare me” goes to Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin which my mother read to me before I was three. I absolutely lost it and have not re-read the story to this day. I pre-read all Potter’s books before reading them to my daughter just in case there is another that is equally brutal. Funny thing is I have yet to meet anyone else who was at all bothered by the book as a kid.

I only ever had Peter Rabbit read to me as a kid, which is bad enough, but my kid started bringing home Potter books from the library, and they are freaking twisted! Especially Jemima Puddle-Duck. Cripes. Luckily most of the creepiness sailed over Chloe’s head.

(BTW, we have solved the Coraline problem - she decided it was going to be too scary and agreed we wouldn’t read it. We’ll stick with Bunnicula and Little House for now.)

Oh, and one that traumatized me: at 12, I read Childhood’s End for school.
It was just too sophisticated for me in many ways, and the description near the end of the one guy travelling vast interstellar distances near the speed of light, with the relativistic implications, just blew. my. mind.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

@Momofgirls

That was The Blue Man by Kin Platt. My fourth grade teacher read that out loud to us for a couple weeks, and it really freaked me out (but I also loved it). I found it at a used book store a couple years ago but haven’t re-read it. I need to do that now, and maybe pass it on to my kids.

YES! That’s it - the cover shown might even be for the same edition I read, although I’m not sure. Thanks. I’ll add it to my Amazon wish list.

[wonky]

@choie

Also there’s John Steinbeck’s The Red Pony. There was a scene, at least to my vague recollection, in which the pony was born and is described as being covered in blood. Naturally this meant that every time I saw the cover to that book (with, natch, a red pony) I envisioned the pony being red because of the blood. Hey thanks, Steinbeck.

Oh god. That book. The vultures. The neck. AAAARRRRGGGGHHH.

[Ferret_Herder]

@bagga

If 12 counts, then there’s only one book that springs instantly to mind.
I read House of Leaves way, way way too early.
Me and my big family had just moved into a big house to accommodate new additions. There were long corridors running the whole length of the house, which was pretty damn long. There was a grand staircase with no light.

There was old Victorian plumbing which groaned and growled around my lonely attic room at night.

The house had previously been an old person’s home, and before that an orphanage.

I was home alone for a week.

:eek:

Yeah, that’s one of the worst possible setups for nightmare fodder. Kind of like bringing along The Shining when your parents are serving as caretakers at a snowed-in hotel for the winter.

[Annie-Xmas]

The Red Shoes by Hans Christian Anderson. I haven’t read it for 45 years, vut it is burned into my brain and it still traumatizes me.

*“Don’t cut off my head!” said Karen, “for then I could not repent of my sin. But cut off my feet with the red shoes.” *

[Malleus_Incus_Stapes]

@Lissla_Lissar

Did anyone else read John Bellairs when they were kids? The Mummy, the Will, and the Crypt, The Curse of the Sorcerer’s Skull, and (oh, kill me now) The Lamp From the Warlock’s Tomb? The last scared me so badly when I was about ten that I refused to go near the damn bookshelf that held the book. There’s a moment, when the main character is in the warlock’s tomb, redoing the incantation to seal in a demon, and nearby there’s a dummy seated in a chair, which has the warlock’s ashes sewn into it…

Oh, him. I found an old copy of Eyes of the Killer Robot lying around, then I ended up reading his other books. Pretty creepy, although I don’t think I was traumatized.

I forgot to mention the book that probably had the most long-term effect on me. When I was eight, I read a book of my mother’s called Discovery of the Soul, about past lives and out of body experiences and stuff like that. The scenes with people floating out of their bodies in the middle of the night especially creeped me out.
I couldn’t sleep that night. And the night after. And the night after that. For years after, I had night terrors, and it started when I read that book. I’m guessing I had had some latant neuroses, and that it was activated by DotS. I don’t know. But I wasn’t able to sleep at night until I started taking Zoloft. Talk about messed up.

[jali]

This:http://www.amazon.co.uk/Black-Alice-Thomas-M-Disch/dp/088184506X

I was about 10 or so and the thought of someone changing a kid’s skin and hair to hide her really freaked me out.

[Lumpy]

This is kind of embarrassing, but it’s a good example of the sort of thing that freaks kids out. My older sister had a book of written for children science fiction stories. I couldn’t even tell you the name of the collection or the story I’m referencing, but it was something about children exploring ancient Martian ruins and finding a lost crypt. For years I was too scared to even look at that book, all because I’d completely misunderstood an illustration. Somehow I took one of the accompanying pictures to mean (as nearly as my seven-year old self comprehended such things) that one of the children had gotten trapped in some sort of horrible autolobotomy machine. Imagine my chagrin when years later as a teenager I finally read the damn story and find out it had nothing at all to do with that. :o

[StarsApart]

Definitely the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books. I never owned them, but my best friend did. I couldn’t bring myself to read the stories for a long time. I would mostly just open up the book to some scary illustration, scream a little bit and then close it again and go out of the room. Those were freaking terrifying. And just as scary when I picked up one of the books just recently as an adult. And just as scary when I looked it up on Amazon just now for this post. Argh. I need to make sure my door is locked.

[monster]

@WOOKINPANUB

The creepiest though was about a girl who buys a jigsaw puzzle at a thrift shot and as she puts it together the picture is revealed to be of her sitting in her own room with the last piece revealing a horrible face peering in her window <shudder>.

I love love love this story!! I remember it vividly. I can’t remember what grade, but it was included in our reading book at school. I really like doing jigsaw puzzles and I always think of this story when I start a new one. What a fantastic scare!

[TroubleAgain]

The books (and movies) that traumatized me were mostly ones with animals suffering or dying. STILL can’t watch/read those.

[lizardling]

@Inner_Stickler

I’d completely forgotten about Behind the Attic Wall! I know exactly where my copy is: buried in the bottom of a cardboard box in my parents’ storage room with a crucifix tied around it. That book is evil, I tell you. Evil.

I would totally have done that if it’d occurred to me, wee babychild that I was. Unfortunately as far as I know, Presbyterians don’t believe in exorcisms so that didn’t do it.

Hmm. There was another book I recall involving a 70s painted cover that had a girl jerking back on a staircase, flashlight sweeping up toward a ghostly Victorianesque lady in red. The ghost had her hand raised and was apparently telling the girl something. GHOSTS AH TELLS YA. Creeped the heck out of me, it did. I think the title involved ‘Staircase’ or ‘Stairs’. Only ever read the book once and never again thanks to the cover.

Risha, thanks for correcting me on ‘The Witches’ btw, but yes, either way it’s still creepifying as heck.

[Spavined_Gelding]

Maybe it is because I am a child of the Second World War and some of my childhood friends were orphans of that war, maybe because I was once young and a soldier, one of Ernie Pyle’s stories/columns/essays always got to me. I probably first read it when I was eight or nine years old but I have re-read it frequently since then.

It is the story of a company commander killed in the mountain fighting in Italy. It starts off with mules hauling the dead off the mountain. Someone says “That one’s the captain,” and the story goes on from there with various men, NCOs and officers walking up to the body and speaking to it as it lies in the shadow of a wall waiting for the graves registration people to pick it up. At one point a sergeant leans over the body, straightens the shirt collar and smooths the torn cloth around the wound. Very touching.

Even today as an aging man who has lived through his own war and learned first hand that war takes the best of men, just thinking about it for this post leaves me a bit emotional.

[loafish]

When I was about six, my older sister read me a story from her English class (she was in 6th grade) about a book collector that finds a one-of-a-kind book in a shop and takes it home where he starts examining it and taking notes about it. One of the pages has a picture of a skinny dragon sitting on a pile of skulls. He meticulously counts the skulls and writes it in his notebook. After making other notes about this particular picture he goes to bed, leaving the book open to the picture. The story jumps to one of his rival collectors who is now in ownership of the book and the original collector’s notes. We learn that the original collector mysteriously disappeared and that the new owner is also examining the picture of the dragon but he notes that the dragon is not nearly as thin as the previous owner had described and that there is also one more skull than the former owner had noted in the picture. I’m sure there are details that I’m forgetting but the implication was that if the book was left open to that page, the dragon could escape and it would then take you back into the book and eat you.

To this day, I can’t leave books open when I go to sleep. As a child I was sure that whatever was in the book would escape (it never mattered whether it was a scary book or not, I always assumed that whatever was coming out would be bad). As an adult, I find I’m just superstitious.

I also spent the years before I got to 6th grade anxiously anticipating having to read the same story for my English class. When the time came, I wasn’t as terrified as I had been as a six-year-old, but I still made sure I closed the book before I went to bed.

[Drain_Bead]

@Ro_Carter

The second was some book I pulled off a classroom shelf one day when I was bored. I can’t even remember the title (it seems like it was two words, like “The Cell” or something). The main character is a girl who gets in a fight with one of her friends. She is going to meet the friend to drop off a typewriter in kind of a “I don’t want your stuff anymore” gesture, but within sight of the friend, is grabbed by some people in a van. She wakes up to find herself in a little cellar, with a bucket to use as a toilet, a bucket of water, and some donuts (I think?). The rest of the book covers the letters she writes and slips out the crack of the cellar door in hopes of someone finding her while she slowly dies of starvation/water deprivation.

The Girl in the Box. I came in here to mention this one. I was so shocked when she didn’t get rescued…