Most books don’t. A lot of times, movies can just by doing the jump out of nowhere with scary music thing…but I guess that’s more making me feel jumpy than really scared. Anyway, in the latest Stephen King thread, a lot of us have said that his books don’t scare us. Which is how I feel. But what DOES scare you?
For me, it’s Ira Levin. Even if it’s just suspense, they really get to me. Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives in particular. That guy is brilliant. I sometimes wish I could go back and unread them so I could have the sensation of reading them for the first time.
William Peter Blatty, too. The Exorcist didn’t scare me horribly, but the sequel kind of did. It was called Legion.
Certain Richard Matheson and Robert Bloch short stories have freaked me out pretty badly, too, but no titles are coming to mind.
Plenty of true crime books have creeped me out, but none as much as the short story by Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado”. The novel that scared me the most was The Exorcist. and yes Levin’s stuff creeped me out too.
Plenty of writers make me tense and jumpy, but it’s rare for one to make me feel fear.
A couple of well-written scenes in The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters really creeped me out. I was reading in bed, and when I turned off the light, I had to put my head under the covers else I imagine letters appearing to be scratched in the walls and a jittery black shadow passing under the door.
At the Mountains of Madness – say what you will about Lovecraft’s prose, he does know how to create atmosphere. I was leery of going into the basement for months.
A cheesy SF novel called The Clone made me afraid to wash dishes. Look at the drain in your sink. Are you sure there’s nothing down there?
Those are the only two I can think of right now. Being forgetful can be a blessing sometimes.
World War Z by Max Brooks made me genuinely afraid of the zombie apocalypse–or any apocalypse. Well, more dread and sadness than actual fear, but you get the idea. It was pretty evocative.
I have to say that The Shining did scare me in places. Of course, I read it when it was first out in paperback, as a teenager. Lord of the Flies also scared the bejeebus out of me a few years earlier.
House of Leaves has to be mentioned. It’s a two stranded book with one part dealing with a sort of haunted house. Very original and chilling, really captures your imagination. The book doesn’t really work as a whole (It was a v ambitious structure for a first novel), but the house is really exceptionally feasome.
I’ve never read Lovecraft, but I’ve read a couple of books by William Hope Hodgeson (*The house on the borderland *and THe night land) that apparently influenced Cthulhu. They have a unique feeling of dread to them. The prose is really archaic, but he captures some primal images of fear such as The House of Silence :eek:
It’s worked so far! Thank heaven for the dishwasher.
I think the reason that I don’t get “scared” is because many of the scary things in books and movies are things that I’ll never encounter (ghosts, vampires, zombies, giant tentacled monsters). But put a spin on something I run into every day (a drain, an underground space) and you can scare me.
But if I ever do stay at a Colorado hotel with a garden maze, I’ll just have a seat on the terrace, thankyouverymuch.
I came in here to say The Clone. I read that (well, about the first third of it) twenty-five years ago, and still haven’t been game to finish it, to this day.
I got as far as the bit where
One of the characters pokes the clone with his finger, and starts to get consumed. They dip the finger in iodine, which kills it. Nonetheless, about 30 seconds later he falls down dead anyway, because it’s still been EATING HIM AWAY FROM THE INSIDE! Gaaaaaaagh! and didn’t get a good night’s sleep for weeks.
Orson Scott Card’s Lost Boys kept me awake all night the first time I read it (in a hotel room, on a business trip). The really impressive thing about this is that nothing really bad actually happens about 95% of the way through the book (and then when the Really Bad Stuff finally does happen, it’s about another dozen pages till you realize it)
I’m putting all the books in this thread on my “never ever read this” list :-o
Salem’s Lot (Stephen King) and Phantoms (Dean R. Koontz) both made it very difficult for me to close my eyes at night. It’s been many years since I’ve read either of them. I read a lot of horror/suspense, but those two stories take the number one spot.
Maybe not quite what you’re looking for, but I used to stay up late and read the stories about real-life serial killers at www.crimelibrary.com. Albert Fish, Son of Sam, John Wayne Gacy…scared the hell out of me.
The original Dracula actually freaked me out, as well.
Reading Pet Sematary scared the bejesus out of me. Creepy, creepy, creepy, everything about it. I got terrible chills when one of the characters shooed their cat off their lap and rubbed their hand as if they’d touched something filthy. And the slow, stumping walk of the cat brought back to life. Oh, hell, everything about the book.
I came to say Pet Cemetary too. I couldn’t finish it, and haven’t read a single King novel since.
I’m easily creeped out though, and stay away from horror in general. the closest I come is Dean Koontz’s “Odd” series - mainly because I can start one in the morning and everybody is safe and sound and the book is over before the sun goes down on me.
I also came in to say Pet Sematary. It was the only book that ever gave me nightmares, and I’m a big horror fan.
I read Coraline by Neil Gaiman in one sitting after dinner, and afterward I was afraid to go outside to take out the trash. (Yes, Coraline is a children’s book. Yes, I was an adult at the time.)
The short story “The New Mother” (read it here) gave me a major case of the creeps.
That story scared me more than anything I’ve ever read. (I read a different version of it, but it was more or less the same as the one in that link.) The wooden tail…ughhhh…just reading it again sends a chill down my spine after 15 years.
I was once scared stiff by someone else’s description of “The Jaunt” by Stephen King (not of the whole story but just of the twist ending.) Thinking about it really gave me the shivers. When I actually read the story, I was totally disappointed; I found it to be typical King (ponderous, boring, used way too many words to get his ideas across, probably written under the influence of coke.)
There was a story in one of those Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books, can’t remember what it was called but it was about a woman and her mother who were staying in a hotel somewhere, and then all of a sudden the mother disappeared and nobody could find her and the room she had been staying in had new furniture and looked completely different, and everyone at the hotel denied that she was ever even a guest there, and the protagonist thinks she’s going crazy, but it actually turned out that her mother had gotten some kind of extremely contagious disease and she had to be taken away, and they covered the whole thing up. But the protagonist of the story never found that out. That one definitely freaked me out as a kid, much moreso than any of the stories in those books involving ghosts or monsters.
Bentley Little is one of the few horror writers that I like. Very little of his work actually scares me though; I just find it entertaining. His short story The Idol was particularly twisted:
two boys go looking for the lug wrench that James Dean throws off the cliff in Rebel Without a Cause, and they find a shack in the woods. Inside the shack is the lug wrench, from the movie, set into a concrete floor and sticking upwards. The walls of the shack are covered in Polaroid photos of thousands of women fucking themselves with the wrench. It turns out that there’s some insane cult of James Dean-worshipping women who ritually go down to the shack and fuck themselves with the wrench.
Primarily The Silence of the Lambs. The sequel Hannibal is thought-provoking along similar lines. Lots of people like the prequel Red Dragon; me, not so much.
Harris’ books made me understand the distinction between horror and terror - terror can threaten you, not just someone you care about.
‘Scary’ writing requiring belief in the supernatural pretty much leaves me bored. For this reason, Steven King doesn’t do much for me. But his short story The Raft does the trick.
