With apologies to jurhael, whose thread “Video Games that kept you up all night!” got me to thinking about this.
With me, it was Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot. I was fifteen or so, and was, for odd familial reasons, living in our unfinished basement. I had Side 1 of Pat Metheny’s insanely creepy As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls playing quietly, over and over again in the background. And I was completely, totally, freaked.
About 3am or so, I realized that it was a school night, and no matter how scared I was, I had to go to sleep. So I turned out the light. And looked over to see the sliding glass doors next to my bed, beyond which was a small stretch of moonlit grass, between the house and the dark woods beyond. It took maybe half an hour of me imagining figures in the dark under the trees, about to come across the grass towards me, before I turned the light back on, finished the book, and stayed up until morning.
And slept through algebra the next day.
So what book first introduced you to the fact that some books just can’t be put down?
For me, it was a Trixie Belden book (The Mystery of the Whispering Witch), but I was pretty young.
In my early teen years, Tom Clancy books always seemed to have the ability to keep me reading through the night. They aren’t the best writing in the world, but until he went completely off the deep end, Clancy knew how to keep you turning the page.
Another Stephen King vote here - Pet Cemetary had me wanting to check under my bed but to scared to! And then I saw the movie, so I had some nice graphic mental images too…
Another 2 King works. The Stand, I got about half way through, before all the supernatural stuff started, and thought it was the scariest thing I ever read. I kept thinking about how I would raid my neighbor’s gun cabinet if similar things happened to me. Couldn’t sleep tht whole night.
Second was a short story called 1408, about a haunted hotel room. I finished it at midnight, and went to sleep right after, terrible idea.
I couldn’t put down The Lord of The Rings the first time I read it in grade school.
“Just one more chapter”
“OK, just one more”
“OK, this is the last one and then I’m putting it down.”
…and so on
I found it in the bookcase of a lakehouse my family had rented for 2 weeks when I was 13 and stayed up all night the first night readingit. Reading the Exorcist, in a dark lakehouse in the woods, with no other houses around. Real smart, huh? That book terrified me.
Bastard out of Carolina did it for me, but that was just a few days ago. Certainly not the first one. I suppose it might have been The Chronicles of Narnia, or maybe one of the Bruce Coville anthologies I used to have when I was in grade school.
When I got a new one, I’d think, “Okay, I have to make this last. No staying up to read all of 'em.” And then I’d do just that.
I think I was in grade four or so, and it was The Keeper of the Isis Light by Monica Hughes. I just couldn’t put it down. It was also the first science fiction book that I read, or at least, that I remember reading. The next night I read **Invitation to the Game**, also by Monica Hughes. Very cool. Most of her books (especially the SF) are amazingly good.
I was very tired for the next few days - my mother couldn’t figure out why.
i thought it would be boring, but wound up being so fascinated by francie and her family that i stayed up all night to see what would happen to them next. i laughed out loud at the little boy who wouldn’t stop nursing, and i cried and cried at…the sad part. i love that book.
A Wrinkle in Time did it for me… I wanted to go somewhere else…
But the narcissistic side wants to say it was My Book About Me, but that only keeps me up now…
Lord of the Rings could have done it, but I didn’t have a copy at home, I thought it must have been a taboo book because of the “secret” alphabet and the hidden place it had in the library – I thought I’d get in trouble for reading it, so I read it in the library… but I stayed up late wondering what would happen next…
Wow. I wasn’t exactly in the basement (my bedroon was half underground though) and I don’t think it was a school night, but I had almost the exact saem experience…same book, same age, same freakout.
I have to wonder, after looking over this thread, how many kids are out there this morning, bleary-eyed and butt-dragging, but with an imagination stuffed full of what they read last night, newly aware of the power that books can have over a mind…
“Sophie’s Choice” kept me up to 4 or 5 am. I couldn’t stop; the present story and the events of the Holocaust alternate, sort of, and I kept being plunged into one or the other and couldn’t bear not to find out what came next. I never heard the alarm the next morning. It must have blared for an hour and I never heard it.
And “It” scared me to death too – me, a hardened veteran of horror stories! I had to go outside and sit in a lawn chair to read it. I could not sit in the house by myself.
