I’ll second The Hot Zone by Robert Preston, for two reasons:
- was on an airplane when reading it, and
- my sister WORKS at USAMRIID
The first chapter of that book scared the ever-lovin’ shit outta me…
Steven King’s The Mangler packs a pretty good wallop, especially if you have ever worked – or even toured – a commercial laundry.
Wow. Hadn’t heard that either, Superdude. John Turturro kicks ass as a crazy.
I have that very story in a collection at home! It’s definitely by Ray Bradbury, but I don’t recall the title. I’ll have to go look it up. I *think[/] it might be “At Midnight, In the Month of June.”
The Shining, again. I also think “Grey Matter” (in Skeleton Crew, I think) is very creepy.
At the Mountains of Madness, by Lovecraft. I know it’s stupid, but ever since reading it years ago, penguins (especially in large groups) creep me right out.
They creep me out so much, I CAN’T EVEN CODE!
I love Stephen King’s short stories. My favorite from his most recent collection is “The Road Virus Heads North”. It gives me goosebumps! King says that it’s based on an actual painting that was given to him by his wife. I would love to see the real one so that I would know if it’s as creepy as what I see in my head when I read that story.
A one page short story (author–can’t remember) about the Last Man On Earth.
It briefly discusses his years of loneliness, because he is deinately & absolutely the Last of Humanity.
And then…the knob on the front door…begins to turn…
That one gave me nightmares, but I’ll still take that one over Neil Gaiman’s “We Can Get It For You Wholesale” (if I’m recalling the title correctly) from his Smoke and Mirrors collection. The “less is more” approach to his description means that what comes through the door in the last scene could be anything.
Holy crap, totally forgot about the Ted the Caver story. Now THAT was by far the most disturbing thing I’ve ever read. It just kept building up this uneasy feeling me, and it got stronger and I got more scared with every page I read, and then the end…oh my, I was almost crying for real.
I haven’t read many of Poe’s short stories, but “The Black Cat” scared me pretty good when I read it my freshman year of high school. When it talked about the cat that had been sealed inside of the wall with the corpse with “red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire”
That scared me pretty bad!
I just finished reading the Caver story thats been linked on here, and what the hell is that all about? Scary, sure. But whats with the abrupt ending? Was it supposed to imply that they died?
If thats the case, then it sucks.
I wonder how true of a story it is 
Damn right.
Slept with a loaded gun under my bed for a week.
Not under my pillow, under my bed so I could grab it as I rolled out of bed and leapt through the window.
Huh. I seem to recall a similar scene in Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles: an abandoned dog wandering around a computerized house looking for its family. Eventually, the dog lay down and died–and was promptly cleaned up the cleaning robot. I couldn’t finish the book. But it wasn’t scary, just unbearably depressing.
YES! Scariest book evar. Re-read it 3 times in a row when I first got the Hot Zone. The shear veracity of Ebola makes it seem so unnatural. Kinda like an alien disease or something.
At the end of the caver story I was expecting to see this picture.
Ditto. And I read an article where the writer asked Steven King if anything he wrote ever scared him himself and this was what he cited.
The ONLY thing that set me off was that it appeared that Turturro was doing the same accent he did in O Brother, Where Art Thou? Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
He also said that the hand coming out of the ground in the movie version of Carrie scared him, and he knew it was coming.
It’s the same story. It’s a chapter that makes a great stand alone story.
Ironically, it’s the story that made me want to read the martian chronicles(I have a wierd affinity for post-apocolyptic stories).
“At the Moutains of Madness” made me shiver on a hot summer day while reading it. That’s what I call creepy.
Sheesh, now THATS closure. :eek:
Too bad the debunking stuff is at the end of that article. I want to believe!