Scariest Moments in Reading

FelineEyes

FelineEyes

Who Walks Through Walls
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Last night I spent a couple of hours watching the 100 scariest moments in horror movie history or something like that and I got to thinking...

What's the scariest moment you've ever read?

For me it's a toss up between the opening of Dracula and a scene in Eddings' The Ruby King (or maybe The Diamond Throne) where the one lady that knights are trying to 'rescue' was eating people. That nearly turned my stomach.
 
I was really young and I was reading the third Animorph book. The girl was about to go down into the cellar of the bad guy and I couldn't carry on reading for ages 'cause it was so scary! Needless to say, I did read it, I haven't been scared by a book since.
 
Not really scary maybe, but Chuck Palahniuk's short story 'Guts' and its history are quite scary (a lot of people fainted at his book tour when he read it out loud).
 
Honestly, the most frightening thing I've ever read was not fiction, but the book "Helter Skelter", about the Manson family murders. There are reasons for this which I've talked about here before, so I won't go into again.

In fiction, though, I can remember having The Exorcist scare the living crap out of me, but that might have been simply because I was reading it alone, at night, in a mostly darkened house. Also there have been some of Clive Barker's short stories that have scared me quite a bit. Once, when I fell asleep right after reading one, I had the only true nightmare I have ever had. But I think I'm going to have to revisit his work, because I can't recall the names of the particular stories that have had that kind of effect on me.
 
When I was in my mid-teens I went through a stage of reading horror stories. Used to frighten myself no end of times.
One in particular stands out in my mind, although not the book title. It was about two explorers and during the night an earwig crawled into one of the mens ears. Well that was fine, they got it out the next day but it wasn't very long afterwards when the earwig eggs started to hatch :eek:
 
I remember very clearly what was my scariest moment in reading. I was just a kid when I started to read Stephen King's books. One day I started to read Salem's Lot and I couldn't stop reading. I read the whole book during the night and when the morning sun stared to shine through the curtains I really felt like escaping the horror... what a relief. I'll never forget it :)
 
I don't know what was actually happening in the book, but I was reading Dean Koontz's Phantoms one night about three years ago. I was in the middle of a climactic scary part when I heard a loud "POP" behind me. I guess one of the power outlets in a the laundry room had, by some freakish way of nature, been stuck by a stray droplet of water flung from one the faucets behind the washer. Needless to say, I screamed so loud I woke everyone in the house.
 
It was Peter Straub's "Ghost Story". When I was reading this book I couldn't be in a room alone. All the time I was sure someone was there. I even slept couple of nights with a light on.
 
James Herbet's Rats,Lair and Domain gave me nightmares.

Funny you should mention The Stand Jason, remember the flu virus...[think it was called SARS]that broke out 12-18 months ago ....my first thought was Captain Tripps:eek:
 
nixie said:
.

Funny you should mention The Stand Jason, remember the flu virus...[think it was called SARS]that broke out 12-18 months ago ....my first thought was Captain Tripps:eek:
Click to expand...

well there's bird flu now I think it really is captian trips
 
Years ago , I was reading The Hungry Moon by Ramsey Campbell in the downstairs room met to the basement . The door to basement was ajar nd just as I was getting a rather intense scene I suddenly heard a bump and I jumped up. The door to the basement had opened all the way .
 
Stephen King's Pet Sematary and Heart-Shaped Box by his son Joe Hill are the scariest books I've ever read. After the first few chapters of each I could only read them in daylight!
 
For a split second I miss read the title of the thread and thought it was a travel thread.
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Pronounced Reding
 
Re-reading anything I wrote. It's scary that so much ignorance and a lack of talent could reside in a single person. Horrifying... o_O

K2
 
My scariest moment was from a story my teacher read to the class in 3rd grade. I remember some kids staying in this haunted mansion and every night when the clock struck midnight, a weird ghost with emerald green eyes would appear. One day they decided to explore to see where it came from. They found a hidden passage behind the clock and there were two trunks. One contained elaborate costume clothes, and in the second - the ghost itself!

Then my teacher stopped reading the story, because she was trying to get us interested in reading independently. So if we wanted to know what happened, we would have to read it ourselves.

I was so scared of this story I never finished it. But I have spent years now thinking about it and wishing I had just read it to see how the story resolved. But I don't know the title or author, so it remains an unsolved mystery.
 
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