I’m so happy you mentioned that. I remembered reading it in school, but couldn’t remember the title. Now to find it and reread.
You Know They’ve got a Hell of a Band is deliciously scary. Then again, I’m a sucker for the whole ‘city couple stuck in a strange town’ schtick- U-Turn, Children of the Corn, all that.
Forgot to mention that it’s a Stephen King story, from Nightmares and Dreamscapes.
I really don’t want to start an argument, but how exactly is are statements like:
I believe
THAT PEOPLE MUST HAVE EVERY OPPORTUNITY TO FULFIL THEIR POTENTIAL.
I believe
IN EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY. INJUSTICE MAKES US ANGRY.
or
I do not believe
THAT ONE PERSON’S POVERTY IS CAUSED BY ANOTHER’S WEALTH.
I do not believe
THAT ONE PERSON’S IGNORANCE IS CAUSED BY ANOTHER’S KNOWLEDGE AND EDUCATION.
scary?
I don’t begrudge you your opininon, but suggest that such statements belong in the pit and not here. I know nothing of this politician, and just popped over to see them and was astounded that such statements could be found ‘scary.’
The short stories of M.R. James - very scary, particularly “Whistle and I’ll Come To You M’ Lad”. Enduringly disquieting.
It helps a lot if you know Michael Howard. His own deputy once commented on the record that Howard had “something of the night about him”. However, this is indeed a digression from the topic at hand.
I found M.R. James’ stories disappointingly tame, with the exception of the description of the children’s party in “Casting the Runes”. The bit about the white hopping thing was pretty darn creepy.
ddgryphon, it was a light-hearted joke. Howard, leader of the Conservatives, is a politician who has been described by a fellow Tory as having “something of the night about him”: he’s rather vampirish.
D’oh, missed reading Gyrate’s post. Sorry.
Definitely Dandelion Wine.
What’s this “Secret Window” thing? Now I’ll have to check it out.
Arthur C. Clarke has a good one, entitled A Walk in the Dark, where an astronaut on a lonely planetoid somewhere has to walk five miles or so to the spaceport in the total dark.
The planetoid is thought to be lifeless, but there are rumors about…noises…which some have heard, like large claws…opening and closing…and there are some odd rock formations, which if looked at just right might look…like something used them to sharpen their claws…But this is all nonsense, right? Five miles – even in the dark I’ll be there in an hour, right?
So the guy starts off and everything is fine. Until his mind starts wondering if there really is anything to those old rumors…and what was that noise? By the time he gets to the last bend in the road the guy is pretty much a basket case, but then the spaceport comes into view and it’s all lit up and everything is wonderful. He’ll be there in five minutes.
But then there is one last dip in the road, where the spaceport drops out of sight for a few hundred yards.
And there is no mistaking the sound of gigantic claws opening and closing in the darkness ahead of him…
In a list like this you’ll always find King, Bradbury, Lovecraft, etc.
But most people have never even heard of “Into the Rose Garden” by Gardner McKay.
No creaks-in-the-night, no spooky moors, no stalking psychos, yet one of the creepiest stories ever written. It’s just one long, involuntary shudder.
My apologies – that went viiiiiiiippp! right over my pointed little head.
That’s some serious dry humor – requiring information I didn’t have.
Please, pardon my humble ignorance.
Mea Culpa — carry on, lads
Well mea culpa too, as I shouldn’t really expect Americans to know anything about the UK’s leader of the opposition!
Tom Tyron’s “The Other” and “Harvest Home.” Both great stories. Also King’s “Pet Sematary.”
Jay Anson’s The Amityville Horror and Mary Higgins Clark’s novels, particularly A Stranger is Watching and Where Are the Children, left me terrorized after reading them in elementary school. I also was scared as shit at the age of 11 after reading a rather indepth book about Sasquatch/Bigfoot sightings in the Pacific Northwest and Canada.
On a different level, I felt psychologically wasted and traumatized after reading "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch" by Solzhenitsyn.
YES YES YES
M.R. James… The Mezzotint gave me fits when I read it as a child. I just reread it last year. Heartbreaking and terrifying still.
John Bellairs bookEyes of the Killer Robot I read as an adult. It was night time and I had to go sit on the bed with my sleeping bf… I was seriously creeped out.
The Shining however didnt scare me…
As a kid I once read a novel for young adults by English writer Robert Swindells. It was called something that translates as “Brother in the Earth” in Dutch, the English title I don’t know. It’s another post-apocalyptic one about people trying to build a new life after a huge nuclear disaster. The bit that sticks with me untill this day is where, after a kind of community is established, a couple fall in love and one of them becomes pregnant. Everyone gets very excited about it. Then the baby is born without a mouth, due to nuclear fall-out. It’s scaring me even as I’m writing this.
My library has it as “Brother in the Land”–I’ll be picking it up next week. Thanks!
I have two short stories that I can’t remember the titles to but nonetheless affected me at the time I read them
One by Fredric Brown(read his short stories…that man can pack quite a wallop into some of the shortest of short stories…hell he has some that are just a sentence or two)
I had to pretty much describe the entire story because I didn’t remember the title(especially this one since it was only a couple of pages long)
Anyway it’s about a lady who thinks she’s being followed on a dark night and so she walks faster and hears footsteps going faster…she walks faster still and the steps goes faster again…she runs and just before she get to her door he catches her and kills her…it turns out to be a gentle “slow” man from the neighborhood and he’s immediately captured and when asked why he did this he just says “She ran”
I read this as a kid and I knew enough to be wary about various evils in the world but it was the first time I realized that someone could do evil without being evil in themselves and it became something new to worry about
The other story was a Stephen King short from the Twilight Zone magazine(probably republished in one of his collections too…I’m not sure)
This one was about the dawn of a new age when they first discovered a teleportation device that worked but any conscious mind that went through it would be driven insane so when they used it they had to make sure everyone on their space ships were unconscious during it’s use…of course some kid doesn’t take the pill(or whatever they used to knock people out) because he’s curious about what would happen and…
I had to give away the ending because that’s the scary part
[spoiler]he’s driven insane(I think his hair even turns white) and his Dad says what could possibly have happened in that instant they were traveling and the kid says “it’s longer than you think Dad” over an over
The horror of that was realizing that while it only took an instant in REAL time to travel with the faster than light ship if you’re conscious your mind is trapped in your body for hundreds or maybe thousands of years with nothing to do[/spoiler]
I always get strange responses when I tell people I think Gerald’s Game is one of Stephen King’s most unsettling and suspenseful books (and I’ve read everything he’s written except Wolves of the Calla), especially in the last half or so. It got under my skin far more than most supernatural horror fiction. Even thinking about it now creeps me out. That said, for the most part, although I think his novels are great, I think his short stories are scariest. In particular, a story called “Crouch End”, from the collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes, scared the ever-loving shit out of me.
I’d also like to mention a short story called “Sticks”, but I can’t remember who the author was or even where I read it.
I’m sure there are others that have scared me, but I just can’t think of them right now.
Like TartPops said, she’s not completely off the mark. William Peter Blatty was inspired to write The Exorcist by a supposed case of actual demonic possession in Maryland in 1949. He changed most of the details – the gender of the “afflicted” child, for example – and the specifics of the child’s life (her mother is a movie star) and the various subplots (their servant has a daughter addicted to heroin) are completely made up. But a lot of the details concerning the “possession” itself – speaking in languages unfamiliar to her, saying and doing blasphemous and vulgar things, displaying physical strength far beyond what could reasonably expected of a child her age, among many others – were taken directly from what he’d heard about the incident of supposed possession and subsequent exorcism in Maryland. Now, you may or may not believe in possession and the supernatural; I’m pretty skeptical, myself. But for those who believe in God, Satan, and the potential for possession, although The Exorcist isn’t quite a documentary, it’s far more than just fiction.
I read a version of this story (at least, I assume it’s the same story) in one of Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books. Those books scared the shit out of me and gave me many sleepless nights when I was a kid. Like Zsofia said, it’s amazing how scary children’s literature can be. Every time I read a list of books banned or challenged in school libraries, although I normally am appalled at that type of censorship, when I see that the Scary Stories books are on there, I always think that maybe, just maybe, it would be for the best if kids weren’t reading that stuff. God knows my parents didn’t want me reading it when I was nearly impossible to wake up after an almost sleepless night.
Someone else mentioned a Joyce Carol Oates story and that reminded me of another of her stories (can’t think of the title right now) in which a woman who’d mistreated her dolls as a child finds herself a guest of sorts in the home of a bizarrely hostile family that bears a strange resemblance to her old dolls.
Stephen King’s “Grey Matter” as a whole didn’t bother me too much, but there’s a part – not relating to the main story at all – where a character talks about encountering (while working in the sewer) kitten-sized baby spiders mewling like kittens for their unseen mother. As a severe arachnophobic, you can imagine how well that sat with me.
Tommyturtle, the Stephen King story you’re talking about is “The Jaunt”.