I don’t know if it’s in honor of Halloween or I’m just in the mood for a scary story but I’m interested in what you consider the scariest books you’ve ever read.
And please don’t write in things like “Audacity of Hope” by Obama or something by Saul Alinsky. Yes, they’re scary but that’s not the kind of scary I’m talking about.
A few off the top of my head:
Salem’s Lot by Steven King. I don’t know if it’s because I read it as a teenager but this book scared me to death at the time. One night when I was up reading it, my brother Kevin stayed out late and got himself locked out of the house so he threw rocks up at my window and started calling/whispering out my name. Yeah, I freaked. So that one holds a special corner of horror in my heart.
Ghost Story by Peter Straub. Just a really creepy tale. But like Salem’s Lot the movie stunk. So don’t watch the movie but the book is a scary read.
Hostage to the Devil by Malachi Martin. It’s scariness comes from how very real it all feels. Details the possession of five different people. Scary.
The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty. This may be the only book on the list that was made into a great movie.
Dracula by Bram Stoker. The father of all vampire books. Scary. And the vampires don’t sparkle. They’re all demony and need killin’ just the way I like them.
I open it up to you. Let me know the scariest books you’ve ever read.
October 7, 2010 at 12:31 am
The short story “The Whistling Room” by William Hope Hodgson, 1910
The short story “The Night: A Nightmare” by Guy de Maupassant, 1887
The short story “The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood, 1907
The short story “Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”, by M R James, 1904
The short story “The Mezzotint”, by M R James, 1904
The short story “The Gable Window”, by H P Lovecraft, completed by August Derleth, 1957
The short story “The End of the Party”, by Graham Greene, 1929
The short story “The Specialty of the House”, by Stanley Ellin, 1948
All of these, in one way or another, have stayed in my memory. I could easily have listed nearly all of M R James's oeuvre. The masterful Graham Greene story is especially chilling for Christians and one needs to scream at oneself "it's only a story" when it ends – otherwise there is only madness.
I also commend to you a beautiful short story which is only tangentially a horror story – "The Happy Children" by Arthur Machen, 1924
October 7, 2010 at 1:34 am
"The Turn of the Screw" by Henry James gets my vote.
October 7, 2010 at 2:54 am
Most of Stephen King's books scared me to some degree or another. Pet Sematary, however, was the only book I could not finish because it was too scary.
October 7, 2010 at 3:42 am
Oh, yes–SK's short story "The Jaunt" was horrifying! One of those which picks at and turns in your mind long after you've finished it.
Fantastic topic for a post! Can't wait to look up some of the titles, especially Malachi Martin's. And I had no idea Koontz was a convert!
No to hijack to post, but have any other converts on here found that their visual tolerance for scary/gruesome has gone *way* down since converting? I can barely watch a horror movie now, and can't stomach anything gory at all. Halloween decor is really creeping me out this year.
October 7, 2010 at 4:18 am
I read the Amityville Horror when I was in the 6th grade and had to stop before I finished it. Couldn't sleep for months afterwards. I still don't like to think about it. It made such an impression on me that I'm not sure I've read another horror story since.
October 7, 2010 at 4:59 am
Ghosts by Hanz Holzer is interesting. Not all of the stories in it are scary but one about a haunted farmhouse was very scary, I thought. I don't mean to be vague but I read it about 10 years ago.
I agree with the other commenters about The Shining and Salem's Lot; my copies are buried in some moving boxes so I guess I will be digging them out soon.
Finally, the short stories The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacobs and Mansize in Marble by E. Nesbit come to mind. Very good, shivery stories! Thanks for this post, it's a lot of fun to see what others have read and recommend.
October 7, 2010 at 5:13 am
I agree with "The Exorcist" but a more recent book is "Dies the Fire" by SM Stirling. An unexplained occurance ends all electricity and combustion stronger than a campfire, with resulting chaos and horror-planes falling out of the sky, no food or power in cities. Terrifying for its realistic portrayal of the collapse of civilization. Terentia
October 7, 2010 at 1:16 pm
The Amityville Horror. I could not sleep after reading that book. The bad part about my reading that is that I actually live in a haunted house, so it just made me all the more frightened. I know how to deal with it now, but I didn't then.
Also, when I was a kid I read one of those Fear Street books, and that creeped me out. One girl was buried alive in it, and died after scraping her fingers down to bloody stumps trying to dig her way out. *shivers* Being buried alive is already a fear of mine (my mom watches Days of Our Lives, and has since I was a kid, and they've used that storyline twice now), but that Fear Street book made me all the more averse to it.
I haven't read Hostage to the Devil yet, but as a person who studies spiritual warfare and the paranormal (because I live with it, and somehow I also always get sucked into these kind of situations with my friends, so I have to know how to deal with these subjects), I want to read it, and probably should. My issue with it is that I read Fr. Martin admitted that it's only about 80% true, with 20% of it being sensationalized, and he refused to tell which parts were true, and which weren't.
October 7, 2010 at 3:46 pm
Actually The Vampyre predates and influenced Dracula, and was written several decades before.
October 7, 2010 at 5:38 pm
How about Left to Tell? It was scary b/c it was a true story about the 1994 Rwanda genocide. I kept wondering how could normal people be killers.
October 7, 2010 at 5:44 pm
Robert Vasoli's book about the Annulment Crisis in the American Catholic Church, because it is dead on truthful about the immoral annulment industry and pastoral perversion in the Catholic Church, is ignored by the Catholic hierarchy to the peril of all society and especially the future of Catholicism and all Christianity.
It should engender very sober reflection, but rather has been marginalized. The price is being paid by faithful abandoned spouses and their children as the "Spirit of Vatican Ii, the Smoke of Satan, thrives among American Catholic Clergy, Canonists and all those feeding the disgustingly immoral divorce, adultery, annulment, remarriage industry.
The Holy Father should be ashamed for his continued lecturing on the subject rather than holding his reprobate brother bishops in America to account and purging their ranks, unilaterally, in large numbers. His restraint, neigh, his scandalous lack of charity, towards those of us who have begged the Papacy for twenty plus years to help us restore the marriages his brother clergy are knowingly and willfully decimating, is unjustified when his own papal courts have seen open and public abuse that cries out for his intervention.
But he talks……..
October 7, 2010 at 8:22 pm
Dracula was definitely creepy-scary. I prefer books where it's not all in your face scary stuff – not too much gore – but where it drags you in slowly and then you realise you're in the sludgepond with the monster…
A good companion to Dracula is The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova – similar feel, and in the same "no sparkling- stop these monsters!" vampire tradition (in fact, it's why I decided to give Dracula a shot, and I really liked it).
If Lord of the Flies counts, can I add the other book my (*parochial* high) school had me read that year – The Chocolate War. I don't know what they were thinking choosing that, but it was really unnerving to read about a kid at a Catholic school in my area getting beaten to a pulp by other students because of being an individual while a monk principal watches from the shadows. Teen "lit" sure, but what a horrifying message it was…
October 7, 2010 at 11:35 pm
No question, The Exorcist.
October 10, 2010 at 2:27 am
Children of Men by P. D. James
Lord of the World by Robert Hugh Benson.
October 13, 2010 at 6:14 pm
Katie, the story you're thinking of is Suffer the Little Children.
You also mentioned The Jaunt. I also think thats one of the scariest stories I've read by S.King. The story itself isn't scary at all but the ideas behind it are horribly frightening. The thought of being stuck in your own head for thousands or millions of years with no way out… ick. Heck, being stuck in that situation for a year is frightening.
The thought of the woman pushed into the teleporter with no destination so her consciousness is stuck forever in there scares the hell out of me.
October 14, 2010 at 1:07 am
Children of Men is the best! just stay away from the movie….
October 14, 2010 at 5:35 am
There were three books written by different authors about the crime case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka that I read one after the other several years ago. It's the chilling true story of the Canadian married couple who together raped and brutally murdered three young women, including Karla's own younger sister Tammy, who Karla helped kill. The books were truly frightening to read. The parts which recounted Karla experiencing some scary paranormal occurrences in her house because she was also involved in the occult in addition to committing those awful crimes with her husband really got to me and kept me up for several nights afterward. Really creepy stuff! I usually don't read crime stories but this particular one caught my attention when I saw a cable tv documentary about the case some years ago. Real life horror story with real monsters in it!