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20
Oct
I know what I consider the scariest book I’ve ever read. How about you? Email me at shelfrenewal(@)gmail.com by Monday, October 25th and let me know!
What do you consider the scariest book you’ve ever read? What made it so terrifying?
I’ll compile a list for next week, just in time for Halloween. Thanks!
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No Responses to “Spoooky…”
Frankenstein. Because it’s written in the form of collected documents, the author vanishes and it takes on a startling immediacy. I was an atheist when I read it but I went and got my father’s old Bible and kept it on my night stand when I slept, just in case.
Oops…that should be Dracula, not Frankenstein. The rest of the post is right, but I got the wrong famous monster!
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. I read this before the vampire craze. Granted, I am not the bravest reader ( I am actually pretty wimpy) but even though I was terrified throughout this book I couldn’t put it down. I have recommended this book to many friends and they all have found it quite scary too. Vampires are always scary.
I’d have to say Pet Sematary by Stephen King. It downright gave me the creeps. Now that may be different than spooky but it is the book that still gives me shivers and is the one that comes to mind when asked this question. It bothered me so that I wouldn’t read King for awhile.
I’ve always been far more spooked by stories that about the evil than men do vs. evils I can’t conceive like machines gone mad.
Seriously, I have to pick 1? The scariest book I have ever read is probably The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty. It feels so real, like it could actually happen, and even though I do not believe in possession, I can’t shake the feeling that it could be true. That is terrifying. A close second would be Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. This one is scary because of the sense of dread that permeates the book from the start. The tension never lifts and you are in a permanent state of fear and anxiety while reading it, and even long after you finish.
Now, if you asked me what my favorite horror book is, I would say The Ruins by Scott Smith. It is scary, but not the scariest I have ever read.
The scariest book I ever read was John Connolly’s Every Dead Thing. After reading it I felt smudged by the fear it invoked. It was VERY dark and VERY scary.
Know how a scary book stays with you and even though you may not remember the entire plot–exactly, but you remember the shivery parts? That is what LUPE by Gene Thompson did to me and I read it a good 20 years ago. The uneasiness begins when two friends visit a Hispanic fortune teller boy called LUPE. He is not who he seems and you can’t seem to get rid of him by any earthly means. Yup, scary. As for non-fiction, it is THE HOT ZONE by Richard Preston. It involves a viral outbreak (and we’re not talking spam) that really, really happened just outside of Washington, D.C. How easily they multiply and go on their merry way, how easily they multiply, leaving death tracks in their wake.
The book that personally scared me the most is Stephen King’s The Shining. Few books have matched it since for the almost unbearable building dread it inspires. Reading it as a teen I remember alternately racing through it and having to put it down because I was seriously freaked out.
The scariest book I ever read was the Amityville Horror. It was a book published in the 70′s, but will always remain right up there for me as one of the scariest. Pet Sematary, The Shining and It by Stephen King are also very scary…
Not a novel, but I always say, Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories That Scared Even Me. That story with the two guys stranded in a room on a capsized ship: Aaaahhh! And “It” by Theodore Sturgeon!! Some scary stuff.
The Dancing Dwarfs, Household
Very dull untill halfway thru, then you won’t be able to step outside after dark.
SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES by Ray Bradbury. I read it as a preteen under the covers with a flashlight, and was almost as scared when I reread it as an adult. Bradbury’s prose captures the fascination and fear of impending adulthood. When I was 12 the Dust Witch who marked the houses with phosphorescence, and the woman in the ice block terrified me. I used to read it aloud every year in October to my freshman. Maybe it’s time to take it up again…
oooh – I have almost all of the Hitchcock short story collections myself!
Due Preparations for the Plague (http://blog.libraryjournal.com/shelfrenewal/2010/10/26/dusty-book-due-preparations-for-the-plague/). Not paranormal spooky, more what human beings are capable of spooky. A disturbing, disturbing book.
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