Trip Fall wrote:
If you think that’s scary, Walter Koenig (Mr. Checkov) also tried his hand at writing a novel some 20-odd years ago. It was so abyssmal that a webpage I came across several years back proclaimed it the Worst Book of the Decade.
It almost makes you appreciate Walter Koenig’s performance in Moontrap…
I second “The Hot Zone,” by Richard Preston. That’s the book that made “ebola virus” a house-hold name. The phrase “crash and bleed out” still makes me shudder.
I also have to second some of the S.K. works I’ve seen named already, especially “Night Shift” and “Pet Sematary.”
Damn, I hate arriving late in a thread 
Stephen King’s The Stand really freaked me out the first time I read it. I’m also hooked on everything written by Dean Koontz.
Grace -
You’re not the only one who loves true crime novels. I will NOT read horror novels, or watch horror movies (get too scared), but I’ll devour true crime novels like there’s no tomorrow. Ann Rule’s * Stranger Beside Me* was great…one of the ones I kept. The other really good one was Sudden Fury, and for the life of me, I can’t remember the author. The scariest thing about that one was…I lived where it happened. Drove by there every day. After reading the book, I was creeped out for a month.
AuntiePam, you beat me to the punch with Armageddon Rag. Music to wake the dead by… ::brrr!::
The novel that creeped me out the most was Straub’s Shadowland. It was one of those books where you’re reluctant to turn the page… but you have to find out what happens next…
Gerald’s Game by Stephen King, and The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allen poe.
Oh I forget. The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson. It’s public domain now, and you can find it here.
Stories That Scared Even Me by Alfred Hitchcock
I think it must be out of print, but one can
check Amazon.Com
Sorry to jump in late, but I agree with the Steven King votes - The Raft horrfies me, as do It (I am deathly afraid of clowns to this day!) and Gerald’s Game. I read the last one about seven years ago, and I still wake up sometimes and check the corners of my room. I still expect to see a necrophiliac knawing on a finger over there.
I also love Koontz. I have nightmares and sleep with the lights on after I read one of his books…I can’t even remember all the names. The scariest though, well a tie: one about a girl who goes to a small town with her younger sister and almost everyone had been killed by this giant moth thing, and another about a man whose a child of incest and hears “Whispers” - I think that’s the title actually.
Also, Steven Connelly writes some scary, true-crime stuff. My fave is The Poet, which is so frightening, especially the ending.
Incidentally, when I was 14 my older brother’s friend had a crush on me. He was rather weird, and so he gave me his dog-eared copy of The Encyclopedia of Mass Murderes and Serial Killers. Eessh I was horrified.
There is also a true-crime book about The Black Dahlia Murder in LA in the 50’s…very horrific. The pictures are pretty bad…for those who don’t know, she was sliced in half, drained of blood…pretty nasty. It’s all there in black and white.
Happy reading!!
Well, I’m glad to see that H.P. Lovecraft hasn’t been overlooked, but my favorite story of his has: The Colour from Out of Space. Brrr. I don’t scare easily–I’ve read a lot of the stuff by King mentioned here without being creeped out too much–but this story had me leaving the lights on for a few days, believe me.
Not to hijack or anything, but there are two other truly frightening pieces of media I feel the need to mention here (and neither is a book):
Stanley Kubrick’s movie version of The Shining. I know a lot of King fans will consider this blasphemy, but as a straight-out horror story I find it way more effective than the book (though I do like the book), mostly due to two things: Kubrick’s imagery, and the soundtrack. I can watch a guy get disemboweled in realistic detail in Dawn of the Dead without so much as batting an eye, but to this day I cannot look at the screen when the close-up shot of those two little girls’ faces are on it. The hair on the back of my neck is standing up at this very moment, just from imagining it. That, and the shot of Danny screaming silently, are the two most bloodcurdling images in the entire film, though there’s a lot of runner-ups (“Heeeere’s Johnny!”).
The Playstation game Silent Hill by Konami. Laugh at my geekishness if you want to–I’ll know you’ve never played it. The basic scenario? A single father, Harry Mason, is taking his daughter, Cheryl, on a late summer vacation to the nearby town of Silent Hill. As they near the town, a figure steps into the road in front of their car, and Harry swerves to avoid it. The car crashes, and he loses consciousness. Upon waking up, he finds that Cheryl is missing. Getting out to look for her, he notices that something is not right in Silent Hill: a thick fog covers everything, and snow is falling–despite the fact that it’s late August. On top of that, the town seems to be completely abandoned. You play as Harry searching the town for his daughter, but the real story is about what has happened in Silent Hill, which is something the game never comes out and tells you. Instead, it gives you all the necessary pieces of the answer, then leaves it up to the player to put them together. This game is a match for even The Shining in the “horrific imagery” department; one of my favorite examples being a disconnected phone sitting in the middle of a table that suddenly starts ringing when you walk past it… (“Daddy? Help me! Daddy?! Where are you…?!”). Oh, and I guarantee you’ll never be able to get in a hospital elevator again without being creeped out…
–Calredic
The first Koontz book you mentioned is called “Phantoms”. I am also a major Koontz fan, though I do believe that some of his books bite the big one, others are fantastic. My favorite all time book of his is still “Watchers”, but one of the freakier ones is “The Bad Place”. I find that King is really good at evoking the visceral feelings, while Koontz is better at messing with your head.
I would definitely agree with you about White Plague. There is something about a horrifying story that is actually plausible that sends chills down my spine. I’ve tried to read many of Stephen King’s stories, but since the supernatural doesn’t really scare me, they usually end up being pointless and I put them aside before finishing (The Stand and The Green Mile were notable exceptions). I just read Hannibal (and reread Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs) and found it interesting, but hardly scary.
If you haven’t read White Plague, it is about a American (virologist, doctor, scientist? - can’t remember; it’s been 15 years) who loses his wife and children in a terrorist attack while on vacation. In the aftermath of his loss, he rages out at the world for taking from him the things he loved and unleashes a plague upon the world. The kicker? The plague causes, at most, only mild illness in men but is invariably fatal to women.
I can’t really think of any other fiction that I found particularly scary, but On the Beach (Neal Shute?) was pretty bleak. I’m looking forward to the new movie version coming out soon. It is about a group of nuclear holocaust survivors in Australia facing the slow spreading of nuclear fallout into the southern hemisphere after everyone in the northern hemishpere has already died. I first read it in about 1987, when all-out nuclear war was something more of a spectre over our heads than it is now.
Try to find The Killer Department by Robert Cullen. It tells the story of the hunt for one of the most sadistic and prolific serial murderers in history: Andrei Chikatillo. The real twist is that Chikatillo was loose in a society that publicly and officially denied that such a man could even exist there. Chris Geralmo made a drama for HBO a few years ago based on it called Citizen X.
If there happens to be a true crime fan out there who hasn’t read the oft-mentioned Helter Skelter, it is definitely the penultimate true crime story. Vincent Bugliosi gives it an especially personal feel since he knows more about the murders, the investigation, and the trial than anyone else could possibly know. Few crime stories are written by one of the prinicpals in a case but are usually written by a reporter or novelist. (Bugliosi was the L.A. ADA that prosecuted Manson, et al).
I agree with those who mention Stephan King’s “Misery”. For some reason, although I read it about 6 years ago, images form in my mind about that horrible woman! Also Dean R. Koontz’s “Whispers” was so weird that it was frightening. And there’s always E.A. Poe. Something about the Birds or the Raven or something like that.
Has anyone read The Blackstone Chronicles by John Saul? A CD-ROM (game) was made of that, which was really creepy, but I was wondering if the book was any good?