All this talk about the Shining on another board has got me revved up about freaky books.
Can anybody recommend the absolute creepiest/scariest/afraid to sleep book ever.
preferrably something that hasn’t already been made into a movie. (that screws everything)
Somebody suggested The Vanishing before. That didn’t quite do it for me.
Thanks in advance
Peppy ;p
Honest answer and a cavet: avoid movies made out of books. The two don’t mix, mostly.
I prefer suave, insidious horrors that creep up the neck and linger in the mind. So my enduring favorite is The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson…
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it has stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and door were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
Great stuff.
Veb
In high school I read a book about demonic possession called Son of the Endless Night. It creeped the crap out of me! Anyone else ever heard of it? I think I’ll do a search…
OK, I found the author, it’s John Farris. Anyone out there heard of him?
The Exorcist…it gave me nightmares…
I had to sleep with a cross beside my bed for a week!
Red Dragon by Thomas Harris, the book before Silence of the Lambs in which he introduced Hannibal Lecter.
Not for the faint of heart!
The only book that ever got to me in that manner is IT by Stephen King. It will still give me a moment of pause before I reach into the sink to clear a clog in the drain.
Forget horror novels. The scariest creepiest book I’ve ever read is The Turner Diaries.
I guess Mien Kamph would also qualify. If it wasn’t so boring.
Someone already mentioned Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House but I would have to throw in her short story The Lottery. It isn’t technically a book, or is of horror genre, but it is very very creepy. It’s just disturbing really. Go read it, you’ll see what I mean.
Jesus Christ…
The Dunwich Horror by HP Lovecraft.
It was right after reading that that I realized I would die someday. A point that everyone reaches but I don’t think I needed it at 13!
The Nightflyers, by George R. R. Martin. A haunted spaceship, no less.
Avoid the movie, it sucks.
I agree- I love that quote. And yeah if a movie has been made from a book, read the book first.
My contributions…
Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives. I practically had to sleep with the light on the night I read this…it disturbed me. So good.
Legion by William Peter Blatty. That’d be the sequel to The Exorcist. Not as gory (no projectile vomit anyway), but I found it even more disturbing, psychologically, than The Exorcist.
There are some short stories out there by Roald Dahl that are pretty dark- The Visitor and The Landlady are two I remember, though there are others.
Whoever said Red Dragon- yeah that rocked. Even more than Silence, IMO.
I’m with Ankh_Too on this one. Stephen King’s It scared me. Admittedly, I was a teenager when I read it.
Funny, though, I haven’t re-read it and I usually re-read books I like.
Misery by Stephen King has always freaked me out.
Also, has anyone read It’s a Good Life by Jerome Bixby? Yes, it’s the short story that the Twilight Zone episode is based on. I think, in ways, it’s a lot creepier than the TZ episode (for instance, Anthony is three and he makes rats eat themselves). I had gotten a Twilight Zone “book” with all the short stories in it that were turned into TZ episodes and there are a lot of stories in there that are creepy. Except for one, called I Shot an Arrow Into the Sky. That one WAS turned into an episode, but the episode was completley different than the episode. The short story was about a guy who’s people in his life were disapearing as if they were never born and eventually he disapears.
From,
Anake
I thought Thomas Tryon’s The Other was really creepy, especially toward the end when you realized what was going on. There was that part about the missing baby…
’Salem’s Lot was just out-and-out scary, to me at least. I’m not one to get all worked up over a book, but that story had me thinking that, you know, a little light on at night is not such a bad thing.
I never saw the movies made from these novels, so I can’t comment on that.
Almost everything that Clive Barker has written has frightened me, so its hard to pick just one. The Books of Blood series is really disturbing. It was pretty scary, also. One scene in particular, where a child gets attacked by some mutated pink insects that fly into his mouth, suck the blood from his tongue, and then swell up and burst, still makes me shudder. But Pet Sematary (also by King) gets my vote for scariest novel. The ending (I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t read it) was one of the creepiest things I have ever read.
And as a side note/hijack, I’d just like to say that the movie version of Pet Sematary was absolutely horrible. And they even made a sequel, for pete’s sake! Yuck.
Pet Sematary…shudder First horror movie I ever saw…and it STILL scares the beejeezus out of me!
The sequel DID suck. When I was 13, though, I loved it because I had a crush on GAG Edward Furlong. Yuck.
(I especially hated it though-the parts where that Gus guy is killing the bunnies made me run out the room crying and the part when they see the cats all torn apart in the vet’s…I hated that…)
Third vote for Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.
andyman – me! John Farris isn’t half bad, really. I have “Son” in hardcover, even. “All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By” is good too.
Here’s another vote for Shirley Jackson’s book.
“Next, After Lucifer” by Daniel Rhodes is quite disturbing, and not many folks have read it.
Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy is pretty high up there on the “There’s something fundamentally wrong here” scale. Basically, the guy kept writing as his mental equilibrium disintegrated. He presents a deeply unsettling world.