Not a horror novel as such, but S.M. Stirling’s The Domination series gave me nightmares. I never had nightmares about Dracula, Cthulhu, Freddy or Jason, but I had nightmares about the Draka!
Stephen King’s Pet Sematary is my scary one…even thinking about it makes me afraid to turn around cuz there will be Gage’s mom, ready to kill.
I didn’t read Salem’s Lot until after I finished the Dark Tower series–if I’d read it earlier, I would have had nightmares.
And many of King’s short stories–especially the one from Night Shift where the guy is growing eyes in his hands and elsewhere. ::shudder::
Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. Wonderfully creepy. So creepy, that while I was reading it in the middle of the day, in the middle of the desert, in my classroom during lunch, I had to go put it down and take a walk, because it creeped me out so badly.
Books don’t really scare me. However, that kind of literature is closer to things that that bother me than any horror.
Anyway, amusingly enough, I finished reading The Shining for the first time last week. I don’t know how anyone thinks it’s scary (and no, I haven’t seen any of the adaptations unless you count The Shinning.)
The Shining…
But some background
I was 15, and we were rebuilding the heritage farmhouse we lived in… at the time of the reading, there was NO power so I was reading it by cadle light…
Also, the rest of the family had left me alone with a high fever (flu… nothing serious)…
I had half dozed off… and the dog stuck her white/speckled dalmation nose into my room…
Thanks to fever vision, I saw it as a skeleton hand…
screaming ensues…
wished I had been reading martin gardner’s “annotaited Alice” instead…
regards
FML
Who Moved My Cheese?
Seconded! :eek:
In all honesty…Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead.
Devil on the Road by Robert Westall.
Broca’s Brain by Carl Sagan. What freaked me so profoundly was a small bit of theoretical cosmology. IIRC, Sagan reasoned that whatever model of universe you posited - expanding, steady state, whatever - at some ungodly far-off point in time, something like 10^600 years into the future, all the matter there ever was would have decayed into pure hydrogen.
No more expansion. No more contraction. No more cosmos, unless by “cosmos” you just meant a permanently dead void.
And God said, “I got nuthin’.” 
Based on the amazon.com excerpt, it seems to be a book written totally in glurge-speak. ::shudder::
I can’t limit myself to just one…
As for me, the Alvin Schwartz Scary Stories to Tell in the dark books always scared me (recently, even…those pictures are evil).
Agree with those of you who said Pet Sematary.
Roald Dahl’s short stories are often quite creepy–Tales of the Unexpected is a great collection of some truly diabolical stories. (And when I was younger, his book The Witches would’ve been on my list of scariest books. Oh, who am I kidding? It still is.)
Rosemary’s Baby, and by the same author, the Stepford Wives, as well.
Willard, by Stephen Gilbert. Yes, the one they made into the rat movie. It was frightening, especially at the end as he’s waiting for the rats to break in and eat him. The original title of the book was Ratman’s Notebooks.
Hmm. I have a copy of this and have never gotten around to reading it.
Pet Sematary
Red Dragon
Gerald’s Game
For some reason, Algernon Blackwood’s short story “The Wendigo” really affected me. To this day, every so often I’ll look up into the sky on crisp autumn nights and shudder.
Completely agree with this - Francis Dolarhyde gave me the willies.
I’ll also agree with the people who mentioned 1984, though I’m not quite sure whether it scared me more or depressed me more on my first reading. (I read this first when I was in hospital far from my home town, sharing a room with a couple of Parkinson’s patients and the only things I had to read were 1984 and Wilde’s De Profundis - not a wise choice. Talk about leaving the hospital feeling worse than when you got there.)
I also found the Alice books somewhat disturbing when I first read them, though now I take them in my stride.
Strieber’s Communion . I could only hope he was crazy.
Anything by Robert Schuller. That people like him exist is frightening.
Oh, yeah. I read these at around age 12, when I had this whole big horror thing going on, and some of them freaked me the hell out. Whistle And I’ll Come To You My Lad and the one with the skeletons wandering around in the park were the worst.
Also read at the same time were most of the works of Stephen King and Clive Barker’s Books of Blood. The Moving Finger was… gaa-a-ah. And the one with the fog and the creatures in it, can’t remember the name. And Barker had Rawhead Rex…
Man, I really need to read those again. I think I need a horror fix.
I completely agree. I read it many years ago before the Hannibal hoopla.
Reading that book alone at night while my spouse was off on a business trip did not help.
::shudders::
The only other book that comes close (mighty close) is Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, which was much scarier than the movie.
In terms of shorter works, Edith Wharton wrote some spine-tingling ghost stories, as well. Hers are more the classical tale, in which everything seems normal at first, but then a few things seem off-kilter, and a growing sense of unease develops…
I have read Stephen King and Lovecraft and Barker and Laymon, but I’m yet to read a book as frightening as 666 by Jay Anson (the bath part in the haunted house stopped me taking baths for at least a year, especially as I lived at the time in old farmhouse). Also a book from my teenage years called “The Brownstone”. All the more scary as it was set in the middle of New York during current times.