I was driving east on I-40 from Gallup -TAK- , New Mexico while listening to SK’s Desperation. I looked around me -TAK- on the road and realized I WAS ON THE DAMN ROAD KING WAS WRITING -TAK- ABOUT IN DESPERATION :eek: Talk about a freaky coincidence! TAK
It is interesting, especially considering so many people say 1408. I read that story and wondered how they’d make a horror movie out of it because I didn’t think it was at all scary. The movie didn’t turn out to be, either.
For me, the scariest is a scene in IT: I found the descriptions of the egg-hunt and the hunting cabin both from way back when disturbing, but what really got me was what happened to the bully in the junkyard. After learning about how he killed his infant brother, you were still able to feel pity and horror when those things came out of the abandoned refrigerator…
“Rachel’s voice was grating, full of dirt. ‘Darling’, she said.”
Two books/stories that really scared me are The Woman in Black (I don’t recall the author) and a short story by Gerald Durrell (or at least related by him) which appears in his (otherwise hilariously funny) compendium of short stories The Picnic and Suchlike Pandemonium. Both are essentially haunted house stories, with a lot of suspense building up to a “jump” moment. The latter was especially good as it involved the narrator’s persecutor appearing through a mirror.
Susan Hill. I liked that one too.
You shut the hell up, right now. 
I haven’t read Pet Semetary in probably 18 years, and I think it’s because of that last line.
Yeah, if I ever want to get my neck hairs on edge, I read “1408”. I can’t even tell you what it is in that story that messes me up, but it’s got it, in spades.
I <B “The Stand”, but the only part that actually creeped me out is when Flagg shows up after Bobby Terry has shot The Judge in the head, and rushes at him, screaming “You SCREWED UP!”. It’s been about 8 years, but I seem to recall a reference to his “hungry teeth”. Gah.
I’m with you. Vampires are a human phenomenon; they’re monsters, but monsters who represent a sort of sick, deformed human. They have parameters in which they operate. Cancer is scary too, but at least you know how cancer works, and sometimes you can beat it. Sometimes you can beat vampires.
1408 was a look into a dimension of evil that defied understanding. Whatever was in 1408 was way, way past vampires.
I think maybe what gets you in “1408” is that it is almost like a dream you have with a bad fever, that disturbs you mightily without being particularly frightening. Maybe part of it is the guy thinking he’s still normal while the reader can see that he’s gone around the bend. Part of it is the extremely rational and competent hotel manager being so matter-of-fact about his belief in the evilness of the room - a guy like that doesn’t become a believer over nothing. King really nailed some disturbing elements in that short story, that’s for sure.
I always thought that was a great chapter (having only read the extended version, I didn’t know it wasn’t in the original). The way King rifles through them so nonchalantly really drives home the magnitude of the Captain Trips epidemic (and aftermath).
Man, I love the Stand – too bad about the ending, though
Oh, and another vote for “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French.” Now, that is truly scary; a description of an actual hell. That one lurked around my brain for awhile.
I just finished reading “1408” and it did not disappoint. Although I would say that the sense of fear and dread leading up to his entering the room was almost scarier than what happened inside.
I remember when I heard a radio news report that King had been hit by a car and his condition wasn’t known. I’m not sure why, but I had some immediate creepy feeling that he was dead/undead/whatever. I don’t remember if drugs were involved or I just had a temporary psychosis thing going on, but for a minute or two I was seriously creeped out.
Another vote for Survivor Type. It’s one of only two SK stories that actually caused me some physical discomfort to read. The other was Dedication.
Oh, but it was WORSE than that…
“Darling, it said.”
That one word makes a LOT of difference.
For me, it didn’t happen until the guy who hit King died under (then) unknown circumstances. 
In IT, when he’s just talking about the town, and how screwed up it was, and you could just SEE how the bad things would happen and it all looked so ordinary. Hazy summer day, small town, shark in the lake, dead kid. Yep, nothing to see here.
snerk. it took me until today to figure out what was wrong with my own sentence.
:smack: :smack: :smack:
it was 'salem’s lot, not the shining, you moron…
i can only say in my defense that it’s been a long, damn summer indeed. 
I’ve read most of King’s stuff, and I’ve re-read most of King’s stuff, but the two stories I will never pick up again are Pet Semetary and Apt Pupil. I don’t think it’s necessarily that they’re too scary, and I think they were very well written, but it’s just that they made me feel kind of…well, icky is the best word I can think of to describe it. I guess the subject matters of those two stories are just too sick for me to enjoy the reading experience.
More on topic, the moment that jumped into my head when I read the thread title was from Eyes of the Dragon, when Peter is climbing down from the Needle while Flagg is rushing up the stairs, weilding a poisoned double-headed axe, and he’s screaming that he’s coming to kill Peter, and the steps get counted off one-by-one…
Another vote for Pet Semetary, especially the moment when he feels the presence of the evil spirit (Wendigo). I read it on a night flight. Scared the poo out of me, despite being surrounded by people.
I never read Pet, and based on stuff here - I won’t!
I remember reading The Stand, and it was the rats in the corn - his creatures. I grew up in corn country, so I KNOW what those hidden pathways are like in the corn, and what the sound of rats in the corn MIGHT sound like, and how the wind going through the corn sounds the same…
shiver
Probably a short story titled “The Revelations Of Becca Blair” (my memory may be faulty wrt the exact title but it’s close), which was published in, of all places, Rolling Stone. This was sort of a forerunner of a sequence in that silly novel The Tommylnockers, but it was much more effective; it told the story of a housewife who, while messing around with her husband’s .22 pistol, accidentally shoots herself in the head – and lives, with this neat little bullet hole going into an unknown part of her brain. At one point she’s kind of numbly exploring it, picks up an eyebrow pencil and inserts it all the way in there…brrrr. And it got *worse * after that. Especially the last couple of sentences.
Also the whole of Pet Sematary really, really, really got under my skin and into my bones. Too bad it was the last thing he wrote that was actually scary.