We’ve asked for your recommendations for paranormals, vampire romances, and romantic romps with the undead.
Today I want to know: what book (and if it’s romance-related, even better) scared the ever lovin’ crap out of you?
For me, the romance recently that freaked me out to no end was Nora Roberts’ Blue Smoke. I’m not kidding. Evil fucking insane villain sexually brutalizes and sets fire to one of his victims, and the reader is witness to the whole scene, getting an in-depth glimpse of how well and truly gone-to-hell this guy’s sanity has been. The victim was chosen because of her spouse’s actions, and she had no idea why until the killer told her, and also informed her she was going to die. That scene stayed with me and STILL unnerves me.
There’s not a lot of suspenseful crime stories that I can stomach, because it makes me paranoid and fretful about the random acts of outward evil that people visit on each other. I can be scared by monsters all day long, but the evil of people? *shudder* Thus I have a hard time reading crime novels and books like it – the scariest stuff for me is the things that are so so evil, and yet possible, or even true.
So – in honor of Halloween – what book scared the crap out of you?
Pet Semetary – by Stephen King.
I read this book one weekend several years ago, while my son was at his aunt’s and my other half was out of town.
It was about 3 AM. I had just reached the part where the cat, Churchill has returned from the cemetary, obviously changed. In the scene the cat is crouched at the end of the protagonist’s bed and our hero is finally fully aware of the horror of what he has done. And of the horror that has returned in place of his son’s beloved cat.
I lowered the book to get a grip on myself. There, at the foot of my bed was my enormous ginger tom, Katsura, giving me the kitty evil eye – you know the ears back, eyes narrowed, mouth open just enough to show fangs look? Just. Like. In. The. Book.
IT by Stephen King. The first time I read it I was about eleven (my mother had forbidden it, so of course I got it down from the shelf) and had to stop at the scene where the little boy is killed by a werewolf. Took a month to pick it up again. It’s still one of my favorites of his.
Oh, and 1984. The rats? *shudder*
The first book I read that really scared the bejesus out of me was Salem’s Lot. I read it when I was 11 years old or so, and for years, and I mean years later, any sort of tapping or scraping sound on my window would freak my shit out because I was convinced it was Danny Glick, asking me to let him in so he could play with me. I kept my blinds tightly shut at night and I refused to look out of windows for too long. To make things worse, the cover of the edition we owned had these pictures of vampires on them, and they freaked me out so much I wrapped the book in plastic and stuck one of those cardboard saint’s prayers things between the plastic and the cover.
That book also caused me to say The Lord’s Prayer almost every night before bed. Didn’t matter that I was a) Buddhist and b) an atheist. In my 11-year-old mind, the Lord’s Prayer was decent insurance against vampires.
And then in quick succession, I read Cujo, Pet Sematary, Christine, It and The Shining. Because of those books, I decided to sleep with my bedside lamp on. If something was coming to get me, I wanted to be able to see it well enough to run.
Hey, anyone remember that short story in Night Shift about the astronaut who returns from Venus with these weird sores on the joints of his fingers, and the sores turn out to be eyes? Dude, that story fucked my shit UP.
Nobody else has scared me in quite the way King has, though James Herbert came close with The Dark.
Also, this incredibly schlocky horror writer named Shaun Hutson terrified me thoroughly when I was 12 years old with an execrable book called Breeding Ground, in which mutant slugs with decidedly carnivorous tastes take over a town. Oh, and touching the slime left by the slugs allowed microscopic baby slugs to squirm in through your skin and enter your bloodstream, where they’d mature and then hatch, causing your body to a-splode with a million squirming bloodthirsty sluglings, but just prior to the hatching, the nascent slugs would spur their hosts to homicidal rages.
This one scene in which a number of killer slugs crawled up through a toilet and literally disembowelled a man sitting on the pot has stayed with me to this day. Oh, also, this book was my introduction to group sex—before reading this, I had no idea that more than two people could have sex at the same time. Quite the eye-opener in so many ways. I really need to see if I can dig up a copy of this book to see if it was as horrifying as I remember.
I can’t remember the last time I was scared by a book as an adult. I’ve become a lot more jaded, I think, and my tolerance for gore is immense. On the other hand, I still keep my bedside lamp on when I sleep alone, so I’m not as hardened as I think I am.
I’ll note that IT by Stephen King scared the crap out of me too. I honest-to-god could not take a shower with my back towards the drain for two weeks. I used the bloody handheld just so I could make sure nothing was creeping up on me. Also, his bogeyman short story. I have no idea why. It just freaked me right out. However, I haven’t really been scared by any of his other books, and I actually found ‘Salem’s Lot boring.
Not a novel, but I read this short story, years and years ago, that I think was in one of those Scary Stories collections. Anyway, it was about these kids who went diving in a pond and this thing, invisible and made of water, got at least one of them and squeezed him so hard his ribs broke, and then the other two kids went running home and something about one got in the shower and the other had his mom washing the dishes, and the thing was in the pipes wherever you got water, and eeek! I spent almost a month freaking out in the shower (see a pattern here?) and washing my hands and face by stretching from as far back as I could so only my hands were in the sink.
Oddly, however, the King short story The Raft (similar premise) didn’t scare me. Maybe because the thing in that was a) visible and b) contained to the lake.
Sorry for the rambling!
As far as scare the p**s out of me, Stephen King’s “The Boogeyman” got me when I was a kid and reading stuff my parents thought I couldn’t reach. It was in the short story collection “Nightshift” IIRC… but in as far as *books* go… Honestly, some of the classics get me best. Frankenstein always does me in because it’s just so…bleak and raw IMHO. It’s not so much I fear the monster under the bed as it’s the idea of science raging out of control.
Ammie, Come Home by Barbara Michaels. It totally freaked me out the first time I read it.
It still gives me the shivers when I reread it, as I do every couple of years.
“Who Goes There?” the basis for The Thing from Another World and John Carpenter’s gory and excellent remake, The Thing.
I read all those icky slug books, too.
1984—the only book I ever read that gave me a nightmare.
I don’t know the author or title because I read it so long ago. I came across the novel among my father’s hardcovers. In the first chapter, a family are riding in a car, on their way to their vacation in the Adirondacks. They’re quarreling, the children are bratty, everyone’s tired, one child’s been car-sick. They have car trouble & stop at a crappy, beat-up diner which looks like only locals go there. (It’s right next to a garage, conveniently.) The family all sit down on the stools, and everyone in the family behaves selfishly, and the children are horrible. They all eat hamburgers.
And then, after a series of events that I no longer recall, the deformed country hick who owns the diner/garage proceeds to murder everyone in the family & hack up their carcasses & hang them in the meat cooler. Where, of course, they will be ground up into hamburger. It’s a sort of Sweeney Todd setup, you see.
The elements of the story seem common enough to me now, and have been reused in countless horror movies, but I was very young when I encountered it … and thereafter determined, whenever we went on a family vacation, never to let Mom or Dad stop at any remote, beat-up looking roadside diner.
What bugs me is that this is only first chapter of the book. There was more. (I couldn’t possibly keep reading, though.) The nihilism of it is probably what got to me … no one survived in the family at all.
*smacks own forehead* How could I forget “Where are you going, where have you been?” and “The Lottery”!
“Butcher’s Theatre” by Jonathan Kellerman
was one of the creepiest books I’ve ever read about a serial killer in Jerusalem.
Also very creeped out by Silence of the Lambs.
The Exorcist had me sleeping with a rosary and lights on for months, saying my Lord’s Prayer and Hail Mary’s to keep the devil away. (I was 16 and went to a girl’s Catholic school)
Sue
This will sound ridiculous, but the first book that comes to mind is one of many books I read about the Titanic. I was alone in the house and it was a very dark night and I felt like if I looked out the windows I would see the ghosts of a dead passenger or two.
Now that I’m older, I know better than to read horror books or anything remotely likely to contain gruesome dismemberment, scary serial killers, or, say, giant whales with corpses attached via harpoon and witches planning to turn children into mice. But when I was little and not thinking clearly, I was seriously freaked out by both Moby Dick and The Witches (Roald Dahl).
Currently all of Karin Slaughter’s books creepy and graphic and creepy yet again!! Not so current but scary at every level has to be The Exorcist – I read it when in my early teens and the school library and the local library had “censored” it by removing the crucifix scenes. I used to throw the book outside of my room before I could sleep at night (once even put it in the freezer – hey I was 11).
I’m the hugest wuss, so I can’t watch scary movies. I can deal with scary books, though.
I read The Shining last year. I had to read it while there was still daylight because it was too scary to read after dark. Too much nightmare fuel.
Several years ago I started to read Tommyknockers but I didn’t get very far in. I liked the heroine and I liked her dog and I knew bad things were going to come their way so I put it down before I had a chance to be creeped out. Somehow I can manage to read about all kinds of horrible things happening to people, but if I get the feeling that something unpleasant is going to happen to a cute puppy I can’t take it. So I don’t know that that counts…
Somebody mentioned Silence of the Lambs. That is a creepy one, but the book in that series that disturbed me most was the first one, Red Dragon. Hannibal wasn’t a walk in the park either. Silence of the Lambs creeped me out the least of the three, but that may be because I’d seen the movie already (I always have to close my eyes when Lecter is taking out the guard) when I read it so I pretty already knew what was coming.
Nora Roberts said, “Rush Limbaugh’s biography. I don’t know if he has one, and I haven’t read it. But if he did and I had, I’d be scared.”
He does in fact have two. The first is called, “The Way Things Ought to Be,” and the second is “See, I Told You So.” Yipes.
The Silence of the Lambs totally freaked me out when I read it in high school. I literally had to talk myself into going to sleep. (“You’re short, you’re a size 6…you’re not his type…”)
It by Stephen King was very scary, too.
I’m still looking for some books that will really scare me like that. So much horror seems to rely on shock value these days, and I’m really tired of novels where kids get killed just because it’s an automatic “no!” reaction from the reader.
The Shinning. I remember reading it with my chair against the wall because I was frightened someone would come up behind me.
The Turn of the Screw and the John Wyndam book about the children who were all clones I think. Although both of these books had very creepy movies and I tend to recall the books through the movies.
The other John Wyndam, The Day of the Triffids was pretty good too.
Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, especially the scene where the two women wake up in the dark and are holding hands between the two beds, terrified of the commotion going on around them, and then the heroine, Eleanor (?) realizes that the other woman (Theodora?) has actually slept through it all…and wonders, if her roommate was asleep, WHOSE HAND WAS SHE HOLDING??? I first read it as a teenager, and it still sends a chill down my spine.
Stephen King’s The Shining. Scariest book I ever read, bar none. It scared me so bad I had to keep putting it down because I was too terrified to keep reading…and then, five minutes later, I had to pick it back up because I couldn’t stop reading. I pretty much read the entire book that way. Stop, start. Stop, start. That was twenty-five years ago, and I still check the bathtub before I get in to make sure there aren’t any rotting corpses waiting for me.
I feel like a big wuss, but as a kid Where the Wild Things are. creeped me out, it’s the bit where they say “Oh please don’t go-we’ll eat you up-we love you so!” and I never trusted people who said things like “I could just eat you up.” because it made me think of those weird monsters in the book.
YES – thank you for reminding me – The Lottery scared the pants off me when I read it in college. Brilliantly creepy.
I can’t believe I forgot The Lottery. It totally creeped me out and I was in college when I read it. Required reading for one of my classes. Ugh.
I have to add one more Stephen King to the mix. His short story, Children of the Corn. I was so freaked by that story and so impressed at the same time. Anyone that can cause me nightmares that still creep into my head to this day in just a few pages deserves a place in the creepoids hall of fame.
Of course, just like I did with IT I watched the movie after reading the story. Sometimes, I’m just not smart.
When a good deal smaller, I was totally freaked out by “The Tale of Samuel Whiskers or, The Roly-Poly Pudding”. The idea of being rolled up in pastry, cooked and eaten by rats was so horrifying I had to hide the book where I could never ever ever accidentally come across it (under the carpet). Until I invariably did and then even the cover would give me nightmares for weeks.
Stephen King, a’ course, too. I was taller then. I’ve never been scared by a romance or mystery novel, probably because I know it’ll all be resolved. The ones that terrify me long term are books with open-ended endings. So even ghost stories like MR James’ will leave me creeped out for days.
Clearly, my literary education is severely lacking. I’ve never read Stephen King. But then, when I was in middle school, I would get nightmares from just reading the backs of Christopher Pike’s Fear Street novels, so I couldn’t go near horror lit for *years*.
The Handmaid’s Tale freaked me out to no end. Stories about ghost ships will keep me up all night. Nora Roberts’s Divine Evil (and now I am afraid to read Blue Smoke!). And, back in elementary school, The Dollhouse Murders, which I am still afraid to try to read again.
Oh, and how could I forget Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Black Cat”? I don’t like to think about that. And Christopher Pike’s Season of Passage. Martian vampires!
Also: mutant slugs with decidedly carnivorous tastes take over a town. Oh, and touching the slime left by the slugs allowed microscopic baby slugs to squirm in through your skin and enter your bloodstream
Deargodinheaven. OH MY GOD. Thanks ever so for sharing, Candy! I’m going to have nightmares now. I’m an honest-to-God slug phobic.
Okay, this is going to sound stupid, but I hate horror books, so I won’t read them. Saying that, one of the most disturbing books I ever read was the book Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule. It’s the true story of Ted Bundy & how she worked with him and stuff. I couldn’t imagine anything like that. Ew!
There was a romance written by someone (can’t think of name right now) that starts out with one of the most brutal rape scenes I’ve ever read. My mom read the book after me and told I should have warned her, but it’s one of those things that you have to read to get…if that makes sense.
My God! How could I forget Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell Tale Heart! It freaked me out when I was a child! And The Fall of the House of Usher! Eee!!!!!!
The Handmaids Tale really stuck with me too. I also was creeped out by Where the Wild Things Are and still don’t really like reading it to my kids.
I listened to an audio of Kiss the Girls while on a walk. It was evening, just starting to get a little dark. I was heading back home on a deserted country road. Walls of dried corn on either side of me.
The audio book was very well done with sound effects. There’s a scene with a couple out on a canoe and it had the sound of the paddle dipping in the water and so on. Then there was the woman screaming in the distance. OMG!! I let out a full lung scream myself and double timed it home. One of the most aerobic walks I’ve ever taken.
It’s weird. I never had a problem with ‘The Witches’ or anything by Dahl, or Coraline, or even the Hannibal series. But one book that scared the hell out of me as a kid was this picture book about a young boy daydreaming about being in medival times and serving as squire to a knight. The knight goes off to fight a dragon, and for a few pages the boy just sits and waits. Then it said, “At dusk, the victor emerged.” On the next pages, there’s a giant, scary-looking dragon coming out after the boy.
Once more, I have to echo Mr. King:
In Night Shift, he has another Salem’s Lot story which scared me more than the novel (I read the story first, so I knew what I was getting into with the novel). That one had me asking my Mom if we had any crosses in the house and I love vampire stories.
The story previously mentioned about the astronaut with the eyeballs on his hand? That had me wiping my hands on my pants the rest of the night.
I never branched out in horror besides reading him.
There are a few Nora Roberts books that give me icks..some have already been mentioned: Blue Smoke and Divine Evil.
Sanctuary is another – The original murder of the heroine’s mum in this one – the hero’s daddy was a very sick puppy, as was his brother.
_The Silence of the Lambs_ is still the scariest book I’ve ever read.
A close second is Steve Thayer’s _The Weatherman_.
For romantic suspense, Tami Hoag’s _Night Sins_.
Both Hoag’s and Thayer’s books take place in Minneapolis, where I live, and reading “local scary” is always scarier than scary in another city.
Don’t read scary, total wheenie. In the late 70’s somebody remade Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein into a movie of several parts. I didn’t sleep well for weeks.
Otherwise, I’m with Nora. Some of the creepiest books I’ve read have been biographies. Howard Hughes, Brian Wilson, Jim Morrison…very disturbing stuff, and it’s real…ick.
I don’t read scary books as a rule but The Watcher in the Woods scared me a lot when I was around twelve.