Inspired by the ‘Stephen King adaptations’ thread.
By scary I mean in the books - those moments where you realise your heart is hammering, the hair on your arms (and your chest ) is standing up and you have to remind yourself to breathe. Here are mine, in no particular order:
Salem’s Lot - Matt hears Mike upstairs the day after Mike dies, and creeps upstairs with a crucifix to confront him. :eek:
Salem’s Lot - Susan and Mark in the basement of the Marsden House as it’s getting dark.
Danny in The Shining outside Room 217.
The short shory ‘Gramma’, from Skeleton Crew. Oh dear Og.
Pet Sematary, where Louis is reburying Gage.
‘1408’ from *Everything’s Eventual.
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The end of ‘The Jaunt’, from Skeleton Crew. I think I actually gasped out loud in shock…
(And on a related note, can anyone recommend books by other authors that have scared them witless? The only ones I can think of that I’ve read are John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. Suggestions gratefully received!)
Not a moment from a book so much a moment while reading a book, but when I read “Cujo” I happened to be sleeping in a basement room while my mom and stepfather were repainting my bedroom. It being a basement room, it tended to get damp in summer, so I had a dehumidifier, which turned itself on and off depending on whatever humidity level it sensed. Funny fact: when the dehumidifier turned itself on it sounded remarkably like a dog growling…
Misery–When Paul Sheldon is reading Annie Wilkes’s book of newspaper clippings. That is the scariest scene ever written with no action and no dialogue. Just Paul reading about Annie’s past history.
Ha brilliant! I remember reading about some poor sod reading The Stand for the first time…while he had flu.
Forgot to mention above as well - the short story ‘The Man in the Black Suit’ in Everything’s Eventual. Like ‘1408’, a great example of teh scaries building up and up…
“Ladyfingers” in Skeleton Crew (I think that’s what it’s called) really freaked me out.
Other scary authors: although it doesn’t show up on the horror shelf usually, Joyce Carol Oates’s book Zombie will scare the hell out of you. It’s the most convincing first-person sociopath I’ve read. And she has a short story whose name is a black bar, the sort of bar used to censor text, that builds up dread to a wild crazy crescendo. That woman is a sicko. It’s great.
The bit in Pet Sematery when Louis Creed finds the dirt on his feet, and realises he might not have just had a nightmare, was simple but remarkably effective for me. I thought the whole story and it’s exploration of a parents biggest fear, was very well done, and it is one of my fave SK books.
There actually aren’t many moments when I have actually felt fear when reading. But these are the moments that came closest:
Salem’s Lot- Danny Glick at Mark Petrie’s window, Father Callahan’s failure of faith in the presence of Barlow The Shining- room 217 Gramma The Boogeyman Pet Sematary- all things to do with Zelda or Pascow. This is both one of the most frightening and most disturbing books to read. For obvious reasons, I haven’t attempted it much since my kids were born.
There is another part in this book where Louis is describing how his mind dealt with unbearable fear. (“Passed it like a stone.”) In that paragraph, he says something like, this is how you deal with the hand from under the bed that stroked your foot in the middle of the night. Gah! Gerald’s Game- Jessie realizing there is someone standing in the corner.
So those are my “fear” moments…of course, there are a lot of things in the books that don’t exactly scare me but are very difficult to read. The first one that comes to mind is in Salem’s Lot: the childbeating mom discovers her baby is dead. That fucks me all up.
I don’t know if it would scare me now, but when I was about thirteen, I had to get up in the night and lock The Amityville Horror in the bathroom because I was too scared to sleep with it in my room.
I wouldn’t watch the TV adaptation of Salem’s Lot when I was a kid, because vampires were then (and are still now) the one thing guaranteed to have me gibbering under the bed with the dust bunnies.
But once, when I was being babysat and was reading Enid Blyton held right up to my face because the babysitter insisted on watching Salem’s Lot, I went out to the kitchen for something…and inadvertantly glanced at the TV screen on my way back to my seat…
…to see Danny Glick hovering outside Mark’s window. With that grin. I can still hear his fingernails clicking… :eek:
Slept with rosary beads taped to my window for ages.
Another vote for King’s 1408… when he says absently into the recorder, “My brother was eaten by wolves on the Connecticut Turnpike,” and again when he picks up the phone to hear, “This is nine. NINE! All your friends are dead! Every friend is dead!”
I got to the end of Pet Sematary and was pretty freaked out, so I went upstairs to be with my family. I lived in the finished area of the basement, but to go upstairs, I had to pass through the unfinished area with the freezer, furnace, dark and menacing objects, cement floor and such. I went out from the suite area and into the basement, heading toward the other finished area. The lights went out, and I was alone in the dark. Freaky.
Then I tripped over the cat in the dark. The cat. In the DARK.
In 4 Past Midnight, one of the first stories was about a plane crash. Oddly enough I bought the book in the Bangor Airport about to fly to San Francisco…
But really, the scariest moment in a book while reading is when the girl from The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon realized she was lost…it was, IMHO, the most singularly scary, self terrifying story I’ve read…
This isn’t jumpy scary, but there’s a bit in the extended version of The Stand that is all about survivors of Captain Trips who died in freak accidents, and all of those were horrifying.
) is standing up and you have to remind yourself to breathe. Here are mine, in no particular order: