Me too!
Plus I’ll add “The Moving Finger,” which I must very carefully avoid thinking about when visiting the bathroom in the middle of the night.
It’s not so much being scared while I read (though those examples were scary at the time), but these stories continue to freak me out later - I don’t forget them, and their impact doesn’t fade.
As for other authors, H.P. Lovecraft is great - “The Rats in the Walls” is good, and “The Color Out of Space” is dynamite. Thank Og we don’t use wells anymore, or that story would have wrecked me!
And a book inspired by Lovecraft was very scary to me: Prey, by Graham Masterton.
Ramsey Campbell’s “The Pattern” is very memorable and scary.
I was reading Misery and when he was reading Annie’s book my dishes in my dish drainer shifted, making a loud, clanky sound. I screamed so loudly that my neighbors probably thought I was being robbed.
In Needful Things when the little boy sees his older brother commit suicide over his involvement with the death of two other characters.
As I read what scares people, I think there are broad categories of things that people find disturbing.
Like, vampires. Now, I fully admit that the idea’s not filled with hugs and puppies, but the vampire depictions didn’t really bother me. Vampires have a purpose, a place in the scheme of things, if you will. Bitten by a vampire, you die, then your body comes back as a vampire. Hate sunlight, can’t stand a cross (wielded with faith, anyway, as Fr. Callahan found. I’m be terrified if I found myself facing one, but at least they’re understandable.
The thing that bothered me so profoundly about 1408 was that it was simply … skewed. There was no context to what was happening. It was being thrust into a situation in which the old rules are replaced by twisted replicas which make no sense at all.
I was interested when I read back over my list to see a pattern. Apparently I’m afraid of “things” coming to get me. Especially at night. Alone in my room. In the dark. Brrrr!
I was ~15YO, reading The Shining, for the first time.
I was lying on my tummy, cross-ways, on my mother’s bed, facing away from the door. I was at the scene where the topiary hedges come to life.
My aunt very quietly crept into the room and tickled the bottom of my foot.
I think I left comic-book-inspired-shaped norinew holes in the ceiling of the room. I thought I’d have heart failure! :eek:
And yeah, the phone in 1408; “All your friends are dead”. :eek: :eek:
I think King raised (har! a pun) vampires to a new and more frightening level when he made them out of people we knew – our friends, family, neighbors. That taps deep into our psyches, when our mom isn’t our mom anymore. We all know to stay away from the red-eyed guy in the cloak who talks funny, but mom?
Forgot to add, and missed my edit window the second time around…
King definitely gave me the one phrase that is guaran-fucking-teed to raise all the little hairs on the back of my neck, no matter how bright the sun may be shining.
My favorite moment in *Pet Sematary * is the last word in the book. “Darling…”. This is when the wife returns from being buried and comes up behind her husband quietly…and puts her hand on his shoulder…
As for other scary books: Read *Harvest Home * and *The Other * by the late Tom Tyron. Well calculated to keep you in… SUSPENSE!
Not really a moment, but a number of chapters, but the build up in The Stand, between when the Superflu is first released, and when the supernatural elements begin to show up. I loved the supernatural parts, but they didn’t scare me.
Because of its tapping a personal phobia, the middle portion of Weeds/The Lonely Death of Jordy Verrell really causes me problems. Ditto the entirety of The Ledge. And the wrist-cutting (well, wrist-cutting aftermath) scenes in IT and The Shining.
A couple from Everything’s Eventual got me pretty good: Guy’s rampage in Lunch at the Gotham Cafe, and the last pages of That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French, almost the whole of The Death of Jack Hamilton (that one made worse by the fact that it was loosely based on a real story), and Autopsy Room Four.
It’s definitely that, too. Which is one of King’s real strengths, when he’s at his best.
The touching and horrific elements feed each other quite well - in this case watching Hamilton’s slow and painful death and descent into delirium is made all the worse by the description of his history, and his relationship with Dillinger and Van Meter - we get to like them, despite their being brutal gangsters. (And racists, to boot.)
the scene early in the shining where the two deliverymen are delivering the crate to the marston house. the whole section made me hyperventilate. king at his absolute freakin’ best.
from a buick 8: creepy, creepy creepy - especially right at the end. goosebumps as i’m typing fer god’s sake!
This reminded me that I didn’t finish that story last time I re-read “Skeleton Crew” - disturbing is the right word.
It didn’t exactly scare me the way “1408” did (I think that was his scariest story for me, too), but the pregnant woman giving birth in the novella “The Breathing Method” stuck with me for a long time. The animated large vehicles in “Trucks” also gave me the willies - really large machines do that to me. They’re just so…big. They could squish me so easily.
Another short story that really creeped me out out was “Sandkings” by George R. R. Martin. I haven’t seen the Outer Limits show; just read the story.
(By the way, I just read in doing research for this post that there is to be a third book in the “Talisman” universe. Yeehaw!)
ETA: I thought it was hysterical in the tv show “Friends” when Joey puts “The Shining” in the freezer when he gets too scared - there have been Stephen King books that I took out of my bedroom before I went to sleep at night.
I gave away my copy of A Prayer for the Dying by Stewart O’Nan. The story was creepy enough, but the photo of the guy on the dust jacket was absolutely chilling. Look it up sometime – I’d post a link but I really don’t want to see him again, ever.
The short story, Jerusalem’s Lot (not the novel “Salem’s Lot”) scared the bejeezus out of me in a few places, like when the protagonist actually went inside the abandoned church in the town, and also when he realized just what was making the noises in the walls and basement of his home…
There’s a scene where the protagonist is in the bathroom, looking in the mirror.
You know his dead, chewed-up and bloody pal is going to appear in the mirror behind him. It’s too cliche, but you know it’s going to happen.
And yet, when it does, even though you know it and are expecting it? Yep, time for new undies! (I think that’s the point where we walked out, we just couldn’t deal with it any more).
I’m a moron. :smack:
I thought I was replying to the “Brown Trousers” thread. :smack:
On topic here? Yanno, I think it might have been the autopsy story, where they were >>>>this<<<< close to slicing the guy open, while he was aware, and feeling stuff, and couldn’t do ANYTHING about it.
