Pajiba

For what it's worth, Cindy, Hose of Leaves will only fuck you up if you let it. If you go into thinking it's precocious and hipster, it won't scare you at all.

I only made it halfway through, because I was annoyed with all the format changes. I realize this makes me ill-qualified to comment, but there you go. Maybe I'll tackle it again.

Scariest book? Definitely House of Leaves. It's not scary in any overt way, but has a way of getting under your skin, even after you put it down. Also very well written. Cindy, you should go for it :D

The Exorcist, because I was in 6th grade, and no responsible adult slapped it out of my young, impressionable hands. It's a well written novel, but no 6th grader needs to be reading about the alternate uses of crucifixes and heads spinning and whatnot. I don't think I got a decent night's sleep after that for three years.

I thought IT was awesome, until the end. What? Turtle? Spider? WTF? But I still don't stand too close to those sewer openings by the curb, just in case.

surprisingly they are both steven king books:

when I was young I was scared of 'The Stand" I did finish it eventually.

More recently "The Cell" I think has me scared to use my cellphone sometimes but I am a punk so there you go.

M.R James - Casting the Runes. Its a selection of short stories by James and its as scary as fuck.

The Ruins
It was two years ago. I am now 34.
It kept me up for two nights. I couldn't take the dog out back because of the foliage in our yard.

Hmmm...definitely The Talisman (Stephen King and Peter Straub). The whole chapter where Jack is working in the bar, and the then takes off when the goat man shows up...scared the ever living crap out of me as a 10 year old. Since then, nothing's really as scary as it used to be.

Well ok, it IS Stephen King, BUT it's one of his novellas.

The Langoliers.

It's in the book Four Past Midnight. It's not as overtly scary as some monster or a rabid dog, but it's even worse than that. It really fucked with my head quite a bit, and a book has never done that before.

And I can't even remember the name of it now, but some guy named Phil Plait has a book out (he has a blog called Bad Astronomy) about how different things in the universe could wipe the earth out in less than a nanosecond and shit. He describes what would happen to your body if you got too close to a black hole, etc. It's true stuff and very much will make you unsleepy at night.

Ah it's called Death from the Skies! (The Phil Plait nonfiction book.) It's fun, but it'll creep you out a bit.

IT, seconded.
Couldn't stop reading it, couldn't sleep.

And I'm not even a colourophobe.

Julie Because we were one of the first families in our suburb to get cable in the early 80s, my brother and I accidentally and without supervision watched The Blue Lagoon (awesome nakedness that confused us a bit) and Salem's Lot, which just gave us horrible nightmares and made us scared of windows at night FOR LIFE. (No matter how much they scratch, DON'T open the window. And do NOT look them in the eyes! Even if you know them and they died last week! It isn't them!!!)

I can't even imagine having read that damn book. Gah.

I don't know that I've ever really been scared by a book. Stephen King has great build up, but also some of the most disappointing endings ever (though I did like Cell). There are some that have kept me on the edge of my seat, perhaps most notably World War Z's more intense passages (like the feral girl's story, or the crashed pilot). Oh, and for a good mindfuck, Brett Easton Ellis will disturb and confuse you. Especially Glamorama.

As for a book I'm scared to read: Catch-22. I read it when I was about 14 or 15. I recall enjoying it, but I also know that I just didn't get it. The jumping in time was too much for me and I just couldn't keep track of things. It's on my bookshelf now, and I always want to give it another read, but it intimidates me. I'm sort of worried that now that I'm 30, I still won't get it.

BTW, for me the scariest Stephen King book was The Shining. Not surprising, it's also a hell of a scary movie but for different reasons.

Is it a bad thing if I envision myself with my own little room in the Overlook, complete w/disturbing/haunting scene of surreality as a perplexed and scared person beholds what unfolds?

The scariest book I ever read was The Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber. If you place it in the proper historical context, wherein the big twist in the book was not a mainstay of the horror film genre (actually originates here) and fear of witchcraft/satanism was a growing again in America, it's terrifying. I've forced myself to revisit it to figure out how he makes some really strange transitions work smoothly in the context of his novel. If I didn't write horror, I probably wouldn't have the nerve to go back to it.

"I only made it halfway through, because I was annoyed with all the format changes."

Oh, vikky, how I long to make sweet love to your sentence. Ditto. Interesting book, and while I see the reason behind the unconventional formatting the deeper I got into the book, it became more of a chore than an interesting read. Plus all the footnotes? Fuck footnotes...

High five to the Salem's Lot creepiness. The kid knocking at the window? Shat my pants just typing it... There were parts of Desperation that definitely flipped my shit out (TAK!), but hands down, it's a toss up between the following: The Amityville Horror - the creepy little red room that wasn't in the blueprints of the house freaked me the fuck out and I almost quit eating pork thanks to a drawing of a demon pig named Jodie. Second are a couple short stories from King's Skeleton Crew - Paranoid: A Chant ("I can't go out no more. There's a man by the door in a raincoat") and Gramma, which is creepy as Tyler Perry diddling your scrotum while you sleep.

"Ordinary Men." The true story about a Police unit of middle-aged family men in Germany that were told they had to go to Poland and kill entire villages. And they did.

I can't read more than a handful of pages before I have to put it down, in serious danger of either bursting into tears or getting physically ill. It's fucking terrifying. But it's on my bookshelf. I'm debating whether I should have my undergrads read parts of it for my "Psychology of WWII" course, but if I can't get through it, I'd imagine they'd have a hard time of it too.

The Road was a letdown to me. It was very meh.

Of course Stephen King owns this - mine would have to be "It". I also totally agree with those above that mentioned his short stories "Gramma" and "The Langoliers".

The only non-Stephen King book I've read that legitimately freaked me out was "Heart Shaped Box" by Joe Hill...and I found out a few months after reading it that "Joe Hill" is actually Stephen King's son, which kind of explained it.

Pet Sematary freaked me out when I read it. I was probably too young to be reading it at all. Also, I left it in our van one night and the next morning it was sitting on our living room coffee table. No one had been out to the van to get it. That skeered me.

I'm too scared to read the Bible.

I read The Road on a schoolbus during a gray, windy & sleeting afternoon. The atmosphere was absolutely bleak and it made the book that much more enjoyable (if that's the way to put it). It wasn't really a scary book, but it there were a few parts that were deeply disturbing. I'm hoping the movie does it justice... Strangely enough, the kid in the movie adaptation will be playing the part of Oskar in the American (and probably fucking horrible) remake of Let The Right One In, which has been changed for no good reason to the utterly stupid Let Me In.

Chinny-chin-chin and whatnot...

One more nod for The Shining, it's truly a very creepy book and although I loved the movie, it didn't scare me half as much. As for Cormac McCarthy,I have to say I'm not sure if I can read any of his books...I started 'The Crossing' a few months ago and had to throw it away from me in absolute horror after about three chapters.I kinda want to see the movie 'The Road' though cuz I gotta thing for Vigo.

I read The Stand, and it didn't impress me much (I have worse nightmares). Horror fiction doesn't do much for me.

However, I read 1984 way back when I was 8, and it scared the fertilizer out of me.

I read "The Shining" as a pre teen and it gave me nightmares for YEARS! Then I took out "Duma Key" recently and that scared the crap out of me too! Oh Stephen, you master of mistery, hooker of horror, how I love the way you freak me out!

DOH, that was supposed to be 'master of MISERY', not what I wrote, which I am not even sure is a word in the English language...oh jheez.

While I love Stephen King, I've never really been terrified by his work the way that I have by other authors, often those who aren't even trying to be scary (though admittedly, most of them do walk the fine line between fantasy and reality). One of the books that gave me a difficult time, at least as far as sleep was concerned,was Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House," and I know someone already mentioned Kafka's "The Trial," and man is that story a mind-f&%@. But I would read either one over again in a heart beat. Honestly though, the only book that ever gave me real true nightmares was Norman Mailer's "The Executioner's Song," and not because it set out to scare me, but I have an overactive imagination and I kept having dreams where I was one of the victims...It was strange and bizarre, and long story later, I never want to have someone analyze that dream.

I fear nothing! Nothing!

Honestly I've never read much horror but from what I can remember The Tommyknockers was pretty creepy.

I'm reading Shutters Island for the CBR II though so we'll see how that is.

"At The Mountains Of Madness" by H.P. Lovecraft

Really, the whole concept of "The Ancient Ones" terrifies me. Movies and stories that have embraced this mythology (i.e. The Mist, In The Mouth of Madness) are horrifying.

I read Salem's Lot when I was in fourth grade and in the hospital. Four beds in my ward and I was the only one there. The little old lady that brought the library cart around probably was glad to see a kid reading a big book.

All those drapes hanging around all those beds? All those shadows from all that strange equipment?

TRAUMA I SAY! TRAUMA!

Oh, word on The Langoliers, Snuggiepants. That fucked my shit up. I saw the made for tv movie not long before I decided to read it and was not all that impressed (though I was vastly amused by Cousin Balki as Mr. Toomey) so I didn't think the story would be that big a deal. Man, was I wrong. I can still hear the crunching if I listen closely. o_O

The Witches by Roald Dahl. Read it as a kid and it kept me awake for nights. It also instilled me with a belief that showers are terrible awful things that will make it easier for evil women to come grab you at night. It's one of very few books I've never re-read because I know that if I do the hallway leading to my room will go from being "annoyingly dark" to "fucking terrifying."

mandasarah I refused to watch the made for TV movie of The Langoliers. I just knew it would suck and ruin the story for me forever.

Oh my God, the former world was cold and smells weren't there and you couldn't light anything? For some reason even that creeped me out. I'm obsessed with time themes, anyway, so you combine that and suspense/horror and you've got a winner in my eyes.

As for illustrations, s. pisaster, I had an old old edition of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales as a kid and DAMN if those color plates weren't totally fucking freaky. To this day, I can hardly look at them. Everyone looks...wrong. Even innocent little girls.

I've already commented but whatever, the Jack Daniels is feeling talkative tonight. I think Stephen King gets a bad rap. Sure, the adaptations of his work uniformly suck, (with the notable exception of the non-horrors, I'm thinking Shawshank and Dolores Claibourne) but damn if the man can't write a great scary book. While I agree that his endings tend to be a let down (and I'm thinking mostly of Carrie here) but he can build up tension like nobody's business. For the record, The Shining and The Stand freaked the living crap out of me. The Stand in particular....the image of Randall Flagg walking down the highway in the dark in his cowboy boots? The weasels in Mother Abigail's cornfield? Larry Underwood trekking through the Lincoln tunnel which is clogged up with cars and bodies? That shit's scary.
Also, for someone who mentioned it earlier, Salem's Lot... the scene where the vampire kid, Danny, is tapping on the window pane? I saw that when I was a kid and 15 years later its still giving me nightmares!

A lot of Stephen King books scared me; Pet Sematary comes to mind. But no book has scared me as an adult the way Betty Ren Wright's books scared me as a kid. Christina's Ghost and The Doll House Murders gave me actual chills. I also liked Mary Downing Hahn as a kid. Wait Till Helen Comes kept me up nights. And Zilpha Keatley Snyder: The Headless Cupid and The Witches of Worm fucked me up. Man I loved scary books when I was little.

I had a collection of horror stories when I was about 10, and my favorite one was about 2 girls staying in a room in a tower, and the one girl went downstairs to investigate some weird sounds and then came back up without her head.

Scared the crap out of me then, makes me giggle now...

Pet Semetary scares me, only for the sad and terrible death of the little boy....

I read a short story in 9th grade, called "Leiningen versus the Ants" by Carl Stephenson. After reading it, my skin crawled for several days. Literally.

I gobbled up horror tales as a youth and don't remember being actually frightened, so I'll go with The Fountainhead. Just to think of all the insufficiently socialized dweebs who gobble up Rand to justify being mother-blaming assholes to everyone...brrr......

Linny:
"Ordinary Men" fucked my shit up. I read it for my freshman history class last year and I still can't get some of the scenes out of my head. Particularly the one where they had the mass grave of Jews they had shot and when they buried it the dirt surface was moving for a while because some of them were STILL ALIVE. Did not sleep for a while. Worst part though was the fact that they were given a choice to participate or not, and over time no one refused. Ugh.

I once read a comment that said that "scary stories to tell in the dark" should have been called "Disturbing Images to Fuck your childhood."

The second half of House of Leaves didn't frighten me. What frightened me was the opening chapter about the 5 1/2 minute hallway. I'm weird like that.

The book that actually fucked me over, though, was Phantom of the Opera. No, I'm serious. There's a part where the Persian (who always gets left out) is taking Raoul down through the catacombs, and there's some undefined guy wandering around in old costumes waiting to pounce on wanderers and drag them back to the beginning of the level. . . I mean the Paris Opera House. Plus, it's all from Raoul's point of view and he's all "why is it dark? why do I have to hold my hand in this funny position? What the fuck is going on?!!"

It's scarier when you read it. I swear.

I was reading It when I was about 13 and I was all alone in the house. There used to be a riverboat that would do a dinner thing around here, you know - it would make a trip down the river and shit while you ate. Anyway, I'm all alone, reading this book and it's right at a scary part with the clown and the riverboat departs. And whenever it departed it played calliope music. Freaked me out. But that's not the scariest book I've ever read. That honor goes to:

The Birds. My mom gave me that to read when I was about 9 years old (WTF were you thinking woman?!?) and that book terrified me. Just thinking about the birds pecking through boarded up windows and shit gives me the shivers.

Oh, then there's that whole torture chamber with the mirrors and the tree and the way it makes you go crazy and then he just drops a noose in there, and lets you do the work yourself. AND his whole "the cricket jumps so very HIGH!!" speech.

Which is the Stephen King short story about the kids on the raft with the black stuff in the water? That one scared my pants.

Poe's short stories are just genius.

I'm going to have to first remember which cabinet I stuffed House of Leaves away in, and then think about reading only in bright sunshine.

VITALS, by Greg Bear, disturbed the shit out of me for some reason. It's listed as a techno-thriller, but it's mostly a very creepy conspiracy/mind control story that has some incredibly unsettling moments.

Boy, you people sure are crazy about Stephen King. If I hadn't already tried to get through The Shining and Pet Semetary multiple times and failed miserably, I'd almost trust you guys enough to go for it. If King isn't too violent for me (I get to the Indian being smashed off his bicycle in Pet Semetary, throw up, and put the book back on the library shelf), he's too slow for no reason other than describing every single detail of a room before continuing with the plot (The Shining (and The Stand, and Blaze, and any of his "short stories" that go longer than 20 pages) literally puts me to sleep). I'd take his son Joe Hill's work any day over his tired prose. Now Heart-Shaped Box, that's a scary horror novel with justifiable violence and a nice suspenseful pace.

Oh, and the book that scared me from my childhood, Something Wicked this Way Comes by Ray Bradbury. Two words: Evil. Carnival. I never saw a film version of it but my imagination was definitely vivid enough to hear the calliope music in the background when I was reading it, and it still gives me the creeps.

As a parent, it was Neil Gaiman's Coraline. It works completely differently for kids and adults...things that gave me the willies, my kid didn't bat an eye at, and vice versa. There's a particular passage about the main monster killing her mother that is ridiculously, casually, completely off-hand and creepy as fuck.

The scariest story also happens to be by Gaiman, and it's called The Price. It's so...detached...like being in the middle of a nightmare.

I also have to go with Stephen King here (also, hi Pajiba! I have a new job now and I almost never get to read the site anymore!) because I read his stuff at a really inappropriately young age, and so it was way scarier than it might have been as an adult. Long sentence. For me the scariest one was the fucking Boogeyman, who lives in the closet, follows the family from house to house, and then eventually is the therapist that the father is seeing to get over his trauma. Jesus H. Christ that scared me.

As an adult the scariest book I've read is Heart-Shaped Box, which mildly pissed me off with the sexualized violence (fucking King family) but mainly just scared the everliving shit out of me. I had to put it down, which I never do. Eek.

Although Stephen King's books can be scary, they have never kept me awake at night, and I have read nearly all of them.

Now Ann Rice - yikes! The Mayfair Witches series - got halfway through The Witching Hour and could not finish it as it scared the heck out of me.

And I still think The Exorcist and the original Night of the Living Dead movies must be the scariest movies ever, although I have not seen Paranormal Activity yet.

Alien Agenda by Jim Marrs. I may not believe in UFOs, but I'll be damned if I'm not concerned about being wrong.

Honestly, the War of the Worlds completely fucked me up. I have no idea why exactly, but that crazy death ray thing was the scariest shit ever.

Also The Shining, obviously. But I've got to say, I hate Cujo. I guess it's kind of scary, but I was really disappointed that basically the only thing wrong with the dog is that he has rabies. I mean rabies is frightening, but it's not at all supernatural. There's no mystery in it, is what I'm saying.

I've never heard of "House of Leaves," but I'm definitely going to check it out. I love a good scare.

I went through a big Stephen King phase that lasted about 15 years. I think his short stories/novellas end up scarier than his full-length novels. Amen to whoever mentioned "The Raft" and "The Mist." Damn scary.

Not going to lie- "The Tripods Series" by John Christopher, most specifically "The White Mountains". We read the first two books in the series in our 6th grade English. I had nightmares that the Tripods were going to 'cap' me and destroy my house for weeks.

Slash, the laundry-press-run-amok story is called "The Mangler." And yes, it was definitely scary. But for me, I think the scariest King story is "The Shining." I read it in high school, reading a chapter or three before bed each night: I slept with the light on for weeks.

I had to read a lot of nasty crap during my undergrad.

Complicity by Iain Banks: AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!
120 Days in Sodom: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
(couldn't even finish it)

But there's nothing like history to mess you up. Holy, holy, holy, holy SHIT! Don't want poachers? Haev the perpetrator carry out his own execution by forcing him to swallow a hare whole and alive with hair intact. Too many gypsies? Slit a live horse's gut open, stick said live gypsy inside, sew it up, watch the torment, watch them die. Did someone say 'Rotisserie Templar'? Aztec? You don't need all of those foot bones, allow us to burn you until your heel falls out. Welcome to Chef Henry VIII Ironic Execution Division: Boil until penitent, braise until tender. Ew, the 'Bulgar Slayer'. Never ask a Viking about eagles, something bad involving salt will happen. Edward I, by the metal sword or on the flesh one. Henry Beauclerc didn't want to gouge out the eyes of his two granddaughters, but it's business. Don't tell Peter the Great that Eudoxia has a new boyfriend. Sure, you divorced her, but that was only 20 years ago! If you don't need to know about Giles de Rais, DON'T FUCKING LEARN. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

Jo 'Mama' makes, as always, a good point. The true stories are the scariest ones.

1) "IT". because i'd rather not shit the bed while i'm reading and i'm pretty sure my husband would leave me due to the nature of nightmares sure to follow me reading about psycho clowns living in the sewer. i have nightmares if i see a commercial about the circus.

2) "SILENCE OF THE LAMBS" - my friend Ruth loaned it to me when I was in grade 12, a few years before the movie came out. I was home alone for a few nights and decided to start reading it then. The damn thing was so engrossing I was about 100 pages in at 12:30am, and scared shitless. It was a lovely spring night and my bedroom window was wide open so I could smell the rain outside. Just when I got to the part where Clarice goes to the garage where there is a scary assed car in storage- a cat fight broke out outside, and those cats were fucking pissed (or horny). I just about vomited, threw the book across the room, locked my bedroom door and sat up in bed keening until dawn. I went into school that morning and threw the book on Ruth's desk and told her she owed me 3 years of therapy. Never finished it. Never will.

Yeah, I remember the Tripod trilogy fucking me up, though it was the second one (The City of Gold and Lead), that always had me. Mainly the whole "we have no idea how to get out of here, especially since just standing and breathing are so damn difficult, while our captors skip around and talk about how much better they have things . .. oh, and there's no end in sight to all this." That and "oh, btw, here's your friend. We keep them under glass like GIANT FUCKING BUTTERFLIES!!"

For me, Stephen King's Misery, most likely because I stayed well away from the more legendary books on my cottage bookshelf. I didn't really relish the thought of diving into Four Past Midnight in a cabin by the lake.

Having said that, Misery really did it for me. I don't think I'll ever watch the movie. There's one passage especially towards the end - at this point, I'm already staring down a lifetime of imagining psychopathic nurses in my basement - where the protagonist wheels himself back into his apartment and actually imagines he sees Annie standing in a corner. I didn't even HAVE to rely on my own imagination. Stephen King did all the work for me.

Bastard.

I loved IT when I read it as a kid (7th grade?). I think they should teach it in middle schools. I recommend it to tween relatives all the time.

Granted, there are some things that happen later in the book make my position somewhat... controversial. Whatever, every kid should have a 1K book on their resume. It's good for their self esteem.

i think i should read house of leaves again, i don't remember being more than creeped out and puzzled by it. it is rather but i think that was mostly because of the way it's printed.

i don't think i've read any books that have scared me, but after dark and kafka on the shore both kinda freaked me out a little during some parts. i don't know why, but i love them both for making me feel all tingly on the back of my neck.

i dunno if the handmaid's tale was more scary or depressing. maybe it just scared me because i'm already afraid of church.

It, hands down.

Just thinking about that fucking drain gives me a shiver.

I've read a lot of true crime books about serial killers. Those are the scariest.

But, as for fiction, The Shining is probably at the top of my list.

A book called Naomi's Room by Jonathan Aycliffe. I'd read bucketloads of King before that (pretty much red everything he'd written in my teen years), but this book scared the ever-lovin snot out of me. Has anyone else read it?

Off the top of my head, I´d have to say King Solomon's mines. I read it when I was about 10 or 11, and I was freaked out by the guy without one eye and the creepy monkey-witch.

Read it years later, and the effect was gone.

More recently I was sorta creeped out by Coldheart Canyon, by Clive Barker. i never re-read it, mostly because it's a big book, but also because it's kinda scarifying.

Also, the book I'd be afraid to pick up? "Mein Kampf". I have this sort of morbid curiosity, but I'm too afraid I'll be grossed out by that creature's visions and ideas to dare to read it.

One of my professors once described it as "boring" and stated that "if [we] ever tried to read it, [we'd] fall asleep". Is this true?

Twilight... It gave me nightmares of ladyboy vampires and no Buffy...

I know the site's publishers don't have a lot of control about the ads, and since ads are what keep Pajiba running, I generally have no problem with them whatsoever, but in the last day or so, they've become unbelievably obnoxious. There are at least THREE different vids and sound tracks playing at the same damn time; I keep frantically muting but the noise keeps coming anyway. Can someone maybe suggest to the advertisers that this is not an effective marketing strategy? I can't make sense of three ads playing at once, and even when I'm not completely overloaded by noise to actually notice the product, I'm only that much more resolved to never buy it.

Love this thread, though, the timing is perfect as I was trying to find good horror books. A little less emphasis on Stephen King would be nice, as I've not found him particularly scary, but maybe I haven't read the right books.

Runners up:
-Stephen King's "Pet Semetary" - That whole sequence after his son's death is bad.
-F. Paul Wilson's "The Keep" - The atmosphere throughout that whole thing is creepy.
-Clive Barker's short story "Dread"

First Place:
-Robert E Howard's "Pigeons From Hell" - My cousin read it to me when I was 10 or so and it scared the bejesus out of me. Still does. Great story.

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Wow, I was just thinking about this the other day. I know it wouldn't be as scary now, but when I was a kid, The Dollhouse Murders was a popular book and as much as I loved it, it terrified me.
It was about a girl who was staying with her aunt, and they discovered her old dollhouse in the attic. The dolls in the dollhouse kept recreating the night when her aunt's parents (the heroine's grandparents) were murdered, trying to reveal who the real killer was.
I was about 9 when I first read this. It was chilling, and yet I had to read it over and over again, even though it scared the hell out of me.

"The Mist" was one of my favorites growing up and one of the few books I read multiple times. I just loved the idea of all the unknown things in the mist. The bigger and more unknown the better. When there was an impossibly loud and unnatural sound from far off in the distance, or a giant leg towering up and out of view connected to God knows what... tingles of joy to my pre-adolescent imagination.

I re-read it when the movie was coming out and while I was a little disappointed in the flat characters and the writing on events inside the store, I was still given a tingle by the unknown and mysterious creatures that were out there, somewhere, in the mist.

I wanted to list this book earlier but I couldn't remember the title. I read it a long time ago but I remember some of the stories in it scaring the living crap out of me. The book is Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural. It is a collection of short stories edited by Marvin Kaye. It is well worth reading.

My dad is a horror fan & had me reading age-inappropriate but thrilling stuff as a kid. From now until the end of time, my scariest will be the first chapter of Dean Koontz's Darkfall. We still talk about it to this day -- affected me at seven the same way it affected him at thirty-five.

Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes I read as an adult but dearly wish someone had read to me before bed as a kid. The Dust Witch? C'mon! Terrifying.

Reading Ramsey Campbell's Nazareth Hill alone at night in my 20's made me turn on all the lights in my apartment -- even rooms I couldn't see from where I was sitting.

Most recently, Dan Simmon's Summer of Night ruined me for a couple days. There are some scenes in that book that come back to me unbidden on a hot, muggy, Midwestern night.

For a non-supernatural scare, "On the Beach" by Nevil Shute. It's about the end of the world via nuclear war. It's a pretty old book, I think it came out in the 1950s, was made into a movie (which I haven't seen).

Salem's Lot was definitely the first, yep that got me good. I just read the first book of The Strain by Del Tero and Hogan, very creepy. But favorite book by far is War Z, I think I read it in a couple of hours... good zombie fun.

Hands Down: Red Dragon by Thomas Harris.

As for books I've avoided: 120 Days of Sodom...read the first couple of chapters, and as much I'd like to challenge myself w/ such a nasty piece o' work, there was just nothing enjoyable about churning my way thru what is basically a moral black hole. I'd be interested to get anyone's take who read the whole thing. What'd you get out of it?

Pop fiction-wise, I've avoided Off Season by Jack Ketchum (sp), about a group of yuppies getting eviscerated (and otherwise) by some feral sub-humans. Graphic scenes of torture, some committed by kids are not my thing, even though I enjoy horror novels.

I would have to say Night by Elie Wiesel. It's not scary in the supernatural or serial killer sense but that one kept me up a few nights thinking about humanity and how the Holocaust could have been allowed to happen.

Yeah, second Ghost Story. That was an absolutely terrifying read with some decent characterization and the nailed the claustrophobia of living in a small-ish town. Straub never repeated that initial success, IMO.

Pet Sematary. I will never read that again, it's just too upsetting. Even King said he was reluctant to publish it.
Books I'm afraid to read - The Road. It just seems like something I don't need to put myself through.

Pet Semetary by King, it didn't necessarily overtly frighten me but the terrible situation that the characters went through left me quite unsettled. I loved The Shining it was unsettling and disturbing.

p.s. I just wondered am I the only one who absolutely loathed the movie version of The Shining, other than Nicholson's great performance I hated that movie and I think that Kubrick is vastly overrated.