The Most Frightening Places in All of Literature

Arrakis Why ? The Fremen are little bit too fanatical for my taste but, what really scare me about that place are those giant Sandworms . I wouldn't fancy being swallowed by one of them.
 
Not exactly literature, but how about the land that Minecraft is set in? There you are peacefully living your life and then every single night your village is attacked by Zombies, undead skeletons, giant spiders, and strange creatures that explode when you get too close to them. During the day there is the constant fear of bandit attacks and you have witches throwing around poisonous potions. Finally, there is the Wither Storm, a giant creature that sucks everything up and devours it.
 
The "Blasted Heath" from The Color out of Space.
Complete unnatural desolation, a haunting backstory, and a lingering infection from an otherworldly horror.

The N.I.C.E facilities from That Hideous Strength.
Brutal fascist private police and military forces who are accountable to no one? Got that.
Surreal nightmarish rooms where select parties are mentally tortured and brainwashed into becoming part the N.I.C.E.'s higher ups? Got that.
Gruesome severed human head brought back to a hideous parody of life by unnatural and unholy science, who acts as a messenger for demons and has a bloodthirsty god complex? GOT THAT TOO.

Camazotz from A Wrinkle in Time.
You must, always and at all times, behave exactly like all your neighbors and people in your social class, down to total synchronization of routine. If you fail, you get punished and tortured into complying.
The whole place is run by a giant brain that claims it's doing what's best for everyone. But in reality it's actively malicious, even proudly identifies itself as a sadist.

And, for a given definition of "literature", Arkham Asylum. A Victorian-esque nightmare that openly functions more like a prison than a mental health facility, is filled with dangerous master-villains who frequently escape, is run by quacks, is very possibly cursed, and is, needless to say, not conducive to actually helping your mental issues at all. But is not looking to shut down or replaced anytime soon, most likely due to the wider corruption in Gotham City.

And as others have already explained, Mordor from The Lord of the RIngs, Room 101 from 1984 and the Dark Island from Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
 
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The NICE HQ is a very good (well, bad) call. Man's inhumanity to man with added literal demons. Oh, there's also a vivisection lab, so man's inhumanity to animals as well.

I remember reading That Hideous Strength in the school library, getting to the bloodbath at the end and thinking "What the hell is this?" It's the written equivalent of the gunfight at the end of The Wild Bunch.
 
Toby Frost said:
The NICE HQ is a very good (well, bad) call. Man's inhumanity to man with added literal demons. Oh, there's also a vivisection lab, so man's inhumanity to animals as well.
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Oh yes, I forgot about that little tidbit.

Toby Frost said:
I remember reading That Hideous Strength in the school library, getting to the bloodbath at the end and thinking "What the hell is this?" It's the written equivalent of the gunfight at the end of The Wild Bunch.
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Oh yes, similar exprerience with me. And this from the guy who wrote Narnia! :LOL:
 
The NICE and its vivisection labs, its rooms for the destruction of the person (remember Mark and the ceiling with the dots?), and its unholy-of-unholies where the Head is pumped into a semblance of life, is sensational if you like, but I wish more attention were given to the St. Anne's household, with its peaceable kingdom (the bear in the bath-room, etc.), its kitchen conversations, its quietness and growing things, etc. I think some readers kind of hurry past those passages, but they are among my favorite places to revisit in all literature.

The description of the NICE and its destruction is (literally) apocalyptic, an unveiling of the dark forces behind the scenes and of their defeat; while the description of the St. Anne's household is a glimpse of the eschatological, the renovated earth, in which the promised restoration of peace and harmony between human beings and animals will occur. A tiger would be safe there -- in both the sense that the people would have nothing to fear from it, and it would have nothing to fear from them.
 
Extollager said:
The NICE and its vivisection labs, its rooms for the destruction of the person (remember Mark and the ceiling with the dots?), and its unholy-of-unholies where the Head is pumped into a semblance of life, is sensational if you like, but I wish more attention were given to the St. Anne's household, with its peaceable kingdom (the bear in the bath-room, etc.), its kitchen conversations, its quietness and growing things, etc. I think some readers kind of hurry past those passages, but they are among my favorite places to revisit in all literature.

The description of the NICE and its destruction is (literally) apocalyptic, an unveiling of the dark forces behind the scenes and of their defeat; while the description of the St. Anne's household is a glimpse of the eschatological, the renovated earth, in which the promised restoration of peace and harmony between human beings and animals will occur. A tiger would be safe there -- in both the sense that the people would have nothing to fear from it, and it would have nothing to fear from them.
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Yes, it's a lovely and brilliant contrast. I personally didn't find the St. Anne's parts too few, but your mileage may vary.
 
Timebender said:
Yes, it's a lovely and brilliant contrast. I personally didn't find the St. Anne's parts too few, but your mileage may vary.
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You're right, really, the novel is not deficient in its provision of St. Anne's scenes -- there are enough. But I love the place so much that I would linger there!

Kentucky essayist Wendell Berry, with his regard for true households and peaceable living, admired this novel, by the way.
 
In seriousness, I didn't find the St Anne's bits of That Hideous Strength convincing, because I felt that Lewis was asking me to buy into something that I didn't get: not Christianity as such but a particular mystical, hierarchical version of Christianity that felt more weird to me than appealing. That said, it is easier to portray what shouldn't happen than what should (which is probably why almost nobody says that 1984 is wrong, as it's almost entirely negative) and very much easier to portray supernatural evil than supernatural good.
 
The town of Salems Lot in Stephen Kings novel.
 
Hill House, in The Haunting by Jackson, is not, what you'd call squared away. "Every angle is fraction of a degree off in one direction or another." Doors shut themselves. It's a crazy house.

If a house symbolizes a person then Hill House symbolizes a crazy person: Eleanor Vance. If we treat the story as an allegory for Eleanor's mental illness, then, by story's end, Eleanor embraces her own insanity. She grows quite possessive of Hill House (her insanity) until she drives her car towards a tree at the end of the story. (Jackson leaves the resolution ambiguous enough for a script doctor to easily soften it so Eleanor winds up in a mental institution, for instance.)

Then there's the icy code heart of the house:

Luke came, hesitated in the cold spot, and then moved quickly to get out of it, and Eleanor, following, felt with incredulity the piercing cold that struck her between one step and the next; it was like passing through a wall of ice, she thought, and asked the doctor, 'What is it?'​
​
The doctor was patting his hands together with delight. 'You can keep your Turkish corners, my boy,' he said. He reached out a hand and held it carefully over the location of the cold. 'They cannot explain this,' he said. 'The very essence of the tomb, as Theodora points out. The cold spot in Borley Rectory only dropped eleven degrees,' he went on complacently. 'This, I should think, is considerably colder. The heart of the house.'​

What role do the cold spots play in this allegory? The opposite of love is indifference (rather than hate). As Dr Montague in the above excerpt says, the coldest spot is located in the heart of the house: Eleanor's heart. And the cold spot's right outside the nursery. Is Eleanor indifferent to the fate of her own unconceived children?
 
The City of Shadar Lagoth in Robert Jordans Wheel of Time Series . Day or night there is really no safe time to be. in that evil city.
 
I was going to say Lovecraft's Antarctica but I agree with Blasted Heath, perhaps because it's more relatable.
Machen's fairyland in the White People.
Or for a bit of reality, the trenches in Junger's Storm of Steel.
 
condatis said:
I was going to say Lovecraft's Antarctica but I agree with Blasted Heath, perhaps because it's more relatable.
Machen's fairyland in the White People.
Or for a bit of reality, the trenches in Junger's Storm of Steel.
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You might find Hodgson's novel The House on the Borderland to of interest.

The Complete Tales of Jules De Gradin by Seabury Quinn has interestingly scary places.

The place where dwells of the Shinning one in Abraham Merritt's novel The Moon Pool .
 
You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.
 
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