A couple of books that scared the crap out of me as a kid:
Ghosts and More Ghosts by Robert Arthur. I checked this out of the Lauderhill Public Library again and again as a kid. I could never remember the annoyingly generic title, but I always remembered the creepy cover! I also encountered the scariest story in a different collection when I was an adult, under the title The Believers.
When I was in elementary school, every once in a while (every quarter?) students could order books and magazines (this was the company that brought us Dynamite magazine). One was a book of short stories that had a tale about a girl who’s home alone at night and starts doing a jigsaw puzzle. As she puts more and more of the puzzle together she discovers the picture is of the very room she’s sitting in. The last piece reveals a horrible face looking in the window. I believe this is the same book that had the story about the girl with the velvet choker and one about someone (a kid?) who can hear this scraping sound and it turns out it’s the sound of an axe being sharpened. I have no idea what the title of the book is but it messed me up for a few weeks. I mean seriously creeped me out in only the way an eight year old can be creeped out.
What was that one story where the police were sure that someone was murdered and they knew who did it, but couldn’t find a body? All they knew was that the murderer was doing a lot of manual labor. At the end the police detective said - the murderer was laboring to WORK UP AN APPETITE. It was considered shocking when published.
Sorry to bring up another medium, but I have to mention the movie “On the Beach” with Gregory Peck. The last scene of a deserted world was very disturbing.
I read these books years ago, but these parts still stick with me:
Pet Sematary - when the little boy’s coffin falls
'Salem’s Lot - the floating vampire kid
Boy’s Life by Robert McCammon - when he sees the doughboy’s legs
Have you read “Shadow Divers” by Robert Kurson. GREAT book/story (true), and it will put you off wreck diving. (If it doesn’t, then read “The Last Dive” by Bernie Chowdhury)
Both books are great insight into the obsession that can take hold of some wreck divers. Since you’re a diver, I’d highly recommend “Shadow Divers”. It’s really a good read - very gripping. They’ve made documentaries about the story.
With the title “The Last Dive” you already know how it ends. But it is a good study on how cave and wreck diving take hold of this guy. How he died was pretty much inevitable, it was just a matter of “when”.
I avoid books that are actually scary, but before I realized I just didn’t like them the scariest book I read was The burning court by John Dickson Carr. I read it in bed until like 2am trying to finish it because it felt too scary to stop, but then I started nodding off and had to give up. Finished it the next day outside in the sunshine.
Cosmic Horror, when done right, scares the hell out of me. Lovecraft just never did it for me, but I have lasting brain scars from Laird Barron’s The Imago Sequence And Other Stories and Danielewski’s House of Leaves.
I was 10 or 11 when my big brother bought a used paperback copy of Dracula by Bram Stoker. Naturally, as soon as he finished it, I had to read it. Scared the absolute bejesus out of me.
That’s the best way to read such a classic. Freshly and without any preconceptions. With ten years, you’re not already spoiled by the thousands of vampire memes, and you can read it as an original story. I first read Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” after having seen and absorbed vampire and Dracula lore till I got 25 or so. But it still was a good read.
