Read anything really scary ??

Tarl_Cabot

Tarl_Cabot

A warriors coin is steel
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Hi........I have just signed up, so be gentle with me.

Has anyone ever read or could recommend a book that has really scared them?

I am talking about a book that had you wanting to look under the bed and double check you had locked all the doors before turning off the lights to go to sleep, or maybe you slept with the lights on after reading!!

I have never found one yet. The closest I have got was "Prey" by Graham Masterton.

Lots of books claim to be scary........... like Jaws, "Read the first chapter before midnight and put it down breathless and stunned." Yeah right!

The Fog by James Herbert......."Dont leave this on Aunt Edna's chair" Well only if she has a phobia of one armed school teachers & garden shears.

I recently managed to get hold of a copy of "Hell House" by Richard Matherson who Stephen King quotes as one of the authors that inspired him to become an writer. It was supposed to be the everest of haunted house stories. I thought it to be more of a mole hill.

Dan Ackroyd said in Creepshow "Want to see something really scary?" Well I dont want to see it, I would rather read it.

Any ideas ???
 
Lovecraft Hmmm thanks for that. He is the author of the Cthulhu ect isn't he ?

I have never really read many of the classic authors such as Lovecraft & Poe. I may have to give them a try.

Although thinking about older stories, I did find The Monkeys Paw quite scary, but I did read it when I was very young. I enjoyed it because it is one of those stories where the horror is left to the imagintion rather than described.
 
Welcome to the Chrons, Tarl!
Hmmm, interesting choice of user-name - but I wouldn't try any of that "womens role in life" ethos on some of our ladies though, unless, of course, you actually like hospital food!:p

If you go along to here you can tell us a bit about yourself, and be officially welcomed!
 
The onyl scary things I've read were the first two books in Geoffrey Huntington's Sorcerors of the Nightwing series - Hellhole and Demon Witch. The third should have been out about 3 years ago. :(
 
Well if you read with that "I CHALLENGE you to scare me" attitude, I doubt there're too many things that'd work, especially Lovecraft who requires you to be willingly immersed into his worlds of cosmic chaos. Most horror reading would ask of you to voluntarily invest a sense of naive belief in their proceedings to be effective.
 
And I'd strongly suggest looking into the classic writers, as the majority of those knew how to key the imagination, but not to be overly explicative.

Lovecraft polarizes people, most of the time. Personally, I think he's one of the best, though his style can be offputting for some. Prey is actually connected to Lovecraft's work, by the way, as was The Manitou (though that's more connected to Derleth's take on HPL....) (and don't even talk about the film!:p )

Depends on what you're looking for. As Ravenus says, if you're going into it with that challenge, almost like a chip on the shoulder, then you're already predisposed to be disappointed. Better to go into it without preconceptions, and judge strictly on merits. Nonetheless, a great deal of modern horror is overly explicit, and lacks that "creep factor", as it were. Lovecraft is very good at that atmospheric horror (he wrote considerably more than the Cthulhu mythos stuff, though that's what most people think of and what he's most famous for, as it introduced something entirely new to the genre). Like Hawthorne, he's very good at giving an historical depth to his work, and unlike most modern horror, the spreading implications of his fiction only grow with repeated readings.

T. E. D. Klein has done some very good work. See if you can find his The Ceremonies (a beautifully crafted novel, despite an occasional flaw) and the collection Dark Gods (a set of four novelettes, each quite good). Thomas Tryon's The Other is quite a good book, as well, albeit of a different sort (and, again, very finely crafted; the subtle use of style in this one, which tells you the explanation almost from the very first page yet keeps you from knowing it, is one of the best examples of that sort of thing I've encountered). His Harvest Home is also quite good.

In essence, I think the most effective horror is not that which makes a person jump, or squirm, but that which gets down in there and makes you feel uneasy, where the uneasiness only grows with time, so that each rereading enhances the beauty of the story. It relies on awe as much as terror (horror, to my mind, being more repulsion than actual eeriness or a feeling of that "rending of the veil", as it were).

So, again, I suggest some of the classic writers, especially Blackwood (try, for example, his John Silence stories (especially the first two, and most especially "Ancient Sorceries"... oh, what a beautiful story!), "The Willows" and "The Wendigo" or "The Listener"; Machen, particularly with "The White People", "The Great God Pan", "The Adventure of the Black Seal" and "The Novel of the White Powder"; M. R. James, especially Ghost Stories of an Antiquary and More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary; H. Russell Wakefield's "The Red Lodge", "The Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster", "'He Cometh and He Passeth By--'", etc.; John Buchan's "The Wind in the Portico"; some of Ambrose Bierce's stories, such as "The Death of Halpin Frayser" and "The Spook House" or "The Middle Toe of the Right Foot"; F. Marion Crawford's "The Upper Berth" and "For the Blood is the Life"; Ralph Adams Cram's Black Spirits and White; L. P. Hartley's The Travelling Grave and Other Stories; any good selection of the supernatural tales by Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, etc.

A good guide to the classics is Lovecraft's Supernatural Horror in Literature, and I'd suggest the annotated version edited by S. T. Joshi, as it also provides bibliographic information for helping to find these older works, plus lots of helpful annotation and ancillary matter. Though written in the 1920s (and updated in the '30s), this remains one of the very best guides to the field to date.

If you'd just like a look at the essay, there ar several place on the 'net where you can read it, including this one:

http://www.noveltynet.org/content/books/lovecraft/super.html

This site also has an index where you can access several of the stories mentioned in the essay, as well:

http://www.noveltynet.org/content/books/lovecraft/super/index.html

Cheers!:)
 
I've just been reading HP Lovecraft's Book of the Supernatural which collects some of the stories mentioned in Supernatural Horror in Literature. One that I really found frightening was The Red Lodge by HR Wakefield. It's a fairly straight forward horror story, but it is very well written and genuinely creepy.
 
Randolph said:
I've just been reading HP Lovecraft's Book of the Supernatural which collects some of the stories mentioned in Supernatural Horror in Literature. One that I really found frightening was The Red Lodge by HR Wakefield. It's a fairly straight forward horror story, but it is very well written and genuinely creepy.
Click to expand...

And for a quiet statement of just sheer nastiness, that final line is right up there with the ones from "Masque of the Red Death" and "The Upper Berth". Yes, a very good story... Shame so much of Wakefield is out of print.....
 
Am just going to put in my meowrr here for the tales of Lovecraft and Poe as well as Wakefield and all their ilk.

However as Ravenus said, if you're going to meet the words with a challenge to scare you, it does quite take shivers away. You need to sink into these tales and let them fill you and the space all around you and work their craft.
 
I guess it's usually short stories that are the scariest - by the time you've got through 2-300 page book , any scares have kind of warn off

I did enjoy The Haunting Of Toby Jugg by Dennis Wheatley (NOT the terrible BBC adaptation!) , but not the SCARIEST I've read

Now I don't usually clss Stephen King as particularly scary . His stories are good , but I usually class him as a thriller than horror writer , because in nearly all cases his novels have happy endings. One of his short stories though called The Sun Dog (from the Four Past Midnight book)
ended on a particularly chilling note. I won't spoil it if you haven't read it , but it certainly scared me!
 
The first book that scared me was Dracula (Bram Stoker). I was 17 and more or less lonely at home. The next was Wampire World (Brian Lumley). I have something with wampires.
 
Aye short stories are really good.

Of course my favourite author for creepyness is Graham Masterton. He writes a very gory and disturbing novel, but his short story's are usually much different. "Flights of Fear" likley a bit rare now, but had the only stories that put a serious cold spike up my spine.

The "true" story of Peter Pan is the best in that collection and it's no childs story. Dark and disturbed. I have scared the pants off a few friends with that one! heh heh heh heh!
 
Ice fyre said:
The "true" story of Peter Pan is the best in that collection and it's no childs story. Dark and disturbed. I have scared the pants off a few friends with that one! heh heh heh heh!
Click to expand...

That reminds me of a short story I read many years ago (Manly Wade Wellman, I think?) about the Pied Piper... a dark enough story in itself, but this handling made it definitely not for children ... unless you want them needing lots of therapy afterward....

I've read quite a few good novels that were genuinely eerie, creepy, and gave that frisson nouveau that the best terror fiction gives -- not just horror/repulsion, but a genuine tingle on the spine and feeling of awe. A lot of the older classics from about the 1840s through the 1920s would fit that bill quite well. But that was something of the "Golden Age" for the weird tale, when some of the very best were writing it: Le Fanu, Wakefield, Hodgson, Bierce, Chambers, Morrow, Blackwood, Machen, James, Wells (who wrote some very fine eerie tales), E. L. White, Vernon Lee, Wilkins-Freeman, Buchan, some of Dunsany -- his darker work is very nasty indeed, Lovecraft, Smith, Wandrei..... Just a wealth of really superb material, which few modern writers in the genre can match for a genuine sense of the disruption of reality. So it's no surprise that some of the best novels in the field (as well as a huge proportion of the best short stories, novelettes, and novellas) come from that period....

And, for those who relish such things, we can all be thankful that a lot of them are being brought back into print again......:D
 
Short ghost stories that scared me:-

Blackham's Wimpy by Robert Westall (haunted World War II bomber)

The Scarlet Lady by Keith Roberts (haunted - or maybe just plain evil - classic car. Written years before Stephen King wrote Christine and does it better at about a tenth the length.)

The Upper Berth and The Red Lodge have already been mentioned.

Just about anything by M R James.
 
A book that I read quite some time ago that put the willies up me and made me sleep with the lights on was Ghost Train By Stephen Laws.

It wasn't the haunted train that scared me but the demonic wardrobe that was exactly like one that loitered in my nightmares as a toddler.

It was also very grizzly with some very nasty imagery.
 
Ye gods - I've just found out that there is an old folk's home in York called Red Lodge!:eek:

Could be worse, I suppose. It could be in Wakefield.:eek: :eek:
 
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