Scary horror novels

[AE35Unit]

I cant say Ive ever been scared by a book, not sure thats possible, but recently I read Hell House by Richard Matheson ( of I Am Legend fame). That was pretty creepy!

 

[SunnyEvans]

I think the only time I've been close to scared by a book was when I was in high school, I read Stephen King's Salem's Lot. Not really a "scary" book, but for some reason I found myself looking over my shoulder for vampires, then telling myself over and over I was an idiot. Read many of his before and after that, and other horror writers as well, but none gave me the same reaction. But then, I don't get scared by horror movies either. Been startled and creeped out, but not scared. Guess it's knowing ahead of time none of it's real (for books and movies in general).

 

[Christopher Lee]

Maybe it's just me, but I don't read horror to be scared. Sure there have been creepy books, like Stephen Law's Spectre, Morgan Fields' Shaman Woods and, of course, Pet Semetary by Stephen King. (of which I am a proud owner of the first edition.) But while they were creepy as hell, none of them scared me. I even have horror music, of all things. Look up King Diamond-albums like Abigail, The girl with the bloody dress and Puppet Master, and you find excellent horror stories.

I think the main reason I love horror is because it has a very different tone than other genres. If it's a comedy, you have a few predictable laughs and know it will end well. Or if it doesn't, it still ends in a funny way. Dramas are often character driven and can be quite, uh, dramatic, but while you might think about them for a while after you read them, they are nothing too special.

But horror? In horror, anything goes. It's easy to say it always ends well in the end, but that's not the case. Every genre has rules, but good horror often breaks them. Nothing is sacred. The main character can die, or worse. (in an Elm Street novel I read, the main character was locked up in a mental institution, too scared to fall asleep again after her friends and a lot of other people had been killed.) Just when you think you know what's going to happen, the rules can change entirely and give you a whole new kind of horror. Jeepers Creepers, anyone? Horrible movie, but interesting plot twist.

My point is I love horror because good horror is so unpredictable, and horror in general spans pretty much everything from historial dramas to sci-fi to anything in between. The only common thing they have is that anything goes. Think you know your Chucky? He got a girlfriend and son. Think you knew Godzilla? Add a bunch of other monsters into the mayhem. Think you know Jason? He didn't die until the fourth movie, but then came back from the dead in the sixth. Anything goes.

The exact reason that I read horror novels, to a T. I could not have said it better myself. However, there is just one novel that ever really frightened me and that was Stephen King's Tommyknockers. Don't ask me why, as the mental state that he was in during the writing of that book should have been counter-productive to his work, but if their is one thing in the world that I find terrifying it is aliens. For some reason, the way he made them take over people's bodies and force them to do things humans would and could not do was scary. Of course, during the taking-over process the decaying of the physical human form added a few additional chill bumps at night.

When done properly, aliens scare me to death. I love them, and I hope they are out there, and I'll read every alien-horror novel there is; but they terrify me. Nothing else I've read scares me. I read horror for the unpredictability, as mentioned above.

 

[Extollager]

I suppose a rare example of a novel that really did seem to me to evoke horror was Charles Williams's Descent into Hell. The (shall we say) psychic collapse of Wentworth as he yield ever more to the "succubus" did evoke horror because it was, in some sense, plausible.

It has been reissued in the Faber Finds series.

I need to reread it, but Madison Jones's Herod's Wife might qualify. But if it is a novel of the supernatural, the strongest glimpse of that comes just at the end.

 

[AE35Unit]

Not heard of either of those authors! ^

 

[j d worthington]

Not heard of either of those authors! ^

Williams was one of the Inklings (Lewis, Tolkien, etc.)....

 

[AE35Unit]

Williams was one of the Inklings (Lewis, Tolkien, etc.)....

Sorry, Inklings?

 

[Sourdust]

Sorry, Inklings?

*Cough*

 

[Abernovo]

I hope J.D. will forgive me for providing the explanation.

The Inklings were an informal literary group of Oxford dons. Lasted for years, but included Tolkien, CS Lewis and Charles Williams.

Completely irrelevant, but there seems to be a bit of tradition of this sort of thing when writers get together and talk. The Mañana Club, was an informal group of US sf writers, including Heinlein and Sturgeon. Today, we've got the Chrons.


EDIT: Ah, I see Sourdust got there first. Serves me right for putting the kettle on.

 

[AE35Unit]

I hope J.D. will forgive me for providing the explanation.

The Inklings were an informal literary group of Oxford dons. Lasted for years, but included Tolkien, CS Lewis and Charles Williams.

Completely irrelevant, but there seems to be a bit of tradition of this sort of thing when writers get together and talk. The Mañana Club, was an informal group of US sf writers, including Heinlein and Sturgeon. Today, we've got the Chrons.


EDIT: Ah, I see Sourdust got there first. Serves me right for putting the kettle on.

Ah, conan Doyle had the Baker Street Irregulars, Clarke had the White Hart!

 

[tylenol4000]

I am also one of those people that is scared by aliens in novels, and movies too. I love UFO/alien abduction stories, and i think the reason they scare me so much is because i truly believe these things happen.

For example: 'The Grays' by Whitley Strieber is maybe the only novel to ever scare me (scared me A LOT). I've done my research on abduction cases, and Strieber really knows his stuff too, mostly from first-hand experiences. So when I read these types of books, they scare me. And I'm talking deep, deep fear within me.

Whenever people talk about what books are scary, I have to recommend 'The Grays' by Whitley Strieber. I guarantee that book will make you sleep with the lights on.

 

[AE35Unit]

I am also one of those people that is scared by aliens in novels, and movies too. I love UFO/alien abduction stories, and i think the reason they scare me so much is because i truly believe these things happen.

For example: 'The Grays' by Whitley Strieber is maybe the only novel to ever scare me (scared me A LOT). I've done my research on abduction cases, and Strieber really knows his stuff too, mostly from first-hand experiences. So when I read these types of books, they scare me. And I'm talking deep, deep fear within me.

Whenever people talk about what books are scary, I have to recommend 'The Grays' by Whitley Strieber. I guarantee that book will make you sleep with the lights on.

You must be joking! His books make me laugh, I mean do people actually believe that Strieber belives that stuff?

 

[tylenol4000]

Yes, yes we do. Open your mind.

 

[Ice fyre]

I find the horror genre a bit more disquieting rather than out and out terror. Graham Masterton has provided me with a few moments of severe disquiet. His writing is fantastic and his powers of desciption are mamazing if a tad on the gory side! Clive Barker the Body Democratic made me twinge a bit, as the implications of that particular story made me shudder. I thought the Tommy Knockers to be a superb effort, it really did give me a few moments of real discomfort and unease, again its more implications of what could happen should the Tommy Knockers get out.

Although that said, while the work of Lovecraft is almost Science and has a little of the boys own adventure about them, in my opnion, they send shivers up and down my spine. There are no car chases no buckets of blood ...just an almost physical sense of unease, the distortion of what we see, and the distortion of the normal everyday order. Ironically Graham Masterton has been tasked with carrying on Lovecrafts work, and the efforts I have read do live up to it. From master of buckets of blood to the master of strange and bizzare and unknowable.

 

[tld314]

The only book that has made me turn on the lights at night was Barker's Books of Blood. None of the scenes were exactly scary, but the mutilations were so well described, almost poetically, that I kept turning the phrases over in my mind at night. Then I started picturing them happening to me. And on went the lights.

King's It scared me in early high school, but I re-read it recently and, though I enjoyed it, it didn't scare me at all.

 

[finbaa]

'It' scared the absolute crap out of me. I had to imagine batman coming to protect me when i was about to go to sleep.

I'm 28

I'm not even ashamed

 

[nixie]

James Herbert's, Rats, Lair and Domain gave me nightmares. Stephen King's Stand made me a little nervous and I read It at an early enough age to scare me witless.

I see Paranoid Marvin mentions Dennis Wheatley's Haunting of Toby Jug, although creepy I never considered it horror.

The books that scared me most were the Collections of old Horror and Ghosts stories by different authors that I read as a young teen but that could have been down to age.

 

[BAYLOR]

The 37th Mandala by Mark Laidlaw

Burn Offerings Robert Marasco

 

[BAYLOR]

Wetbones by John Shirley

 

[BAYLOR]

The House on The Borderland by William Hope Hodgson. Very atmospheric, The build up and the payoff are worth it.