Anything published by the RNC or its facilitators, especially since 2020.
(I found It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis to be upsetting when I lived in Metro Detroit during the Republican Convention that used the Moral Majority to select Ronald Reagan as candidate.)
I recently read that The New Yorker received more letters after they published “The Lottery” than any other article or story they ever ran.
Ursula LeGuin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas isn’t exactly scary, but it’s haunting. I still get chills thinking of it, 20 years after I first read it.
EDIT: actually upon reconsideration, probably not appropriate for a 12 year old.
Both great points.
First, it’s funny you brought this up. We sat down and watched Poltergeist and she noped right out of the room in the early scene where the kid is walking up to the fuzzy screen. Not the kid talking to the TV, what scared her was a child born in 2010 has never seen a tv channel turned to ‘salt/pepper’ or the snow ‘channel’. The clown doll was of course scary, that is just timeless terror.
For the second, as a jumping off point tomorrow morning I’ll ask her about the scariest things in films she’s seen. 'Cause you’re right, different things scare different people. Print, in particular, is tricky because it all plays out in your mind, so surprises like jump scares don’t work.
I nominate “The Entrance” by Gerald Durrell - I think I was about 12 when I first read it, when it terrified me, and even re-reading as an adult I still find it pretty disturbing and very well-done.
It was published, very incongruously, in his collection “The Picnic and Suchlike Pandemonium”, which is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read - until you get to that story, at the end.
Well, unless you’re 10 years old reading Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark for the first time and you flip the page to discover this illustration that haunts my generation’s nightmares to this day;
Crap. I really want to read it now but can’t find it on the net. I’ll have to try and borrow through interlibrary loan.
ETA: Interlibrary loans temporarily unavailable. Dern you, @Dead_Cat! Dern you to heck, I say.
‘The October Game’ by Ray Bradbury. And also ‘Zero Hour’ by him, two stories that gave me the creeps all my life. … When I was young, I spent much time at the library and read a lot of collections of stories put together by Alfred Hitchcock. One book was called ‘Stories They Won’t Let Me Do On TV’ (and for good reason). … I will mention, while I’m here, a couple of creeptastic stories I don’t know who wrote them but they’ve stayed with me for decades. One was about a group of Victorian gentlemen who somehow came across an invisible…creature? …from another dimension? They took a mold of it and saw it was the ugliest demonic looking thing they ever saw (and eventually it died)…Another was set in the deep south, a pile of trash took human form and was driven out of town by angry townspeople and buried deep in the ground. And the ending, was a young woman who crept out at night, laid on the ground, and listened to the sound of the trash monster buried deep in the ground, scratching, scratching…wish I knew the names of these two beauts… I was 12-ish when I read these, and many more disturbing short stories.
If you want to pull a great prank on her, I can get you a customized signed photo of the little boy from Poltergeist. I’m very good friends with his SO. I could have him autograph it to her with an appropriately scary inscription, which would be doubly scary if she didn’t know how he knew her name or that she was scared of the movie.
:evil grin:
Footsteps Invisible
https://www.unz.com/PDF/PERIODICAL/ArgosyWeekly-1940jan20/46-57/
Good one! I first read it in this collection by Robert Arthur, Ghosts and More Ghosts. However, the story that scared the socks off me was The Believers, about a radio host doing a live show while handcuffed to a bed in a haunted house.
As an aside, Robert Arthur was the creator of the Three Investigators series of mysteries that I loved as a kid. The first book in the series, The Secret of Terror Castle, had parts that I found genuinely spooky (although in the end it turns out that there are Rational Explanations for all the ghostly phenomena).
Danny Tell em not to believe! It’s cause they believe! It didn’t exist! i thought it up! But they all believed me. You said they did. Five million people all believing at the same time!..they’ve made it Danny! They brought it to life!
Man, I totally believed it could work like that, too.
“Candle Cove” by Kris Straub. It’s about a group of people online who are trying to remember a TV show they watched as kids.
One was about a group of Victorian gentlemen who somehow came across an invisible…creature? …from another dimension? They took a mold of it and saw it was the ugliest demonic looking thing they ever saw (and eventually it died)
Fitz James O’Brien, What Was It? A Mystery - Wikisource, the free online library
Another was set in the deep south, a pile of trash took human form and was driven out of town by angry townspeople and buried deep in the ground.
A similar story was parodied in Mad Magazine #5 in “Outer Sanctum”, as “Heap”!
Huh! that goes back a ways! Late 40’s?
There’s a Youtube spinoff by Straub called Local 58, which consists of analog recordings of a low-power TV station in West Virginia which is apparently being hijacked by an eldritch god that lives in the Moon. It’s good stuff.
Of particular note is Contingency, which depicts the “accidental” broadcast of an emergency message meant for use in the event that the US is occupied by a hostile nation.
Ah, thank goodness! I knew I’d read this one but couldn’t find it.
Thanks for the recommendation! The first story I went to was “The Entrance” – spooky indeed! Being a fan of humour, I then proceeded through the other stories from the beginning. The first one, “The Picnic”, was entertainingly funny writing, but a sort of gentle humour reminiscent of the classic Life with Father series by Clarence Day. But the second one, “Maiden Voyage”, went all-out and had me laughing out loud – in fact it had dozens of laugh-out-loud moments! Thank you! I’m just now starting on the next one.