The Most Horrific, Scariest, And Down Right Terrifying Books

Seconding Animorphs. Ants? Termites? Taxxons? The kids' growing darkness, Rachel slowly turning Blood Knight, Marco's ruthlessness, Cassie's manipulativeness, Jake's coldness? Future!Visser 3 killing and eating Tobias with barbeque sauce? Or how about the fact that they're 13 when this starts?

Bret Easton Ellis books are quite disturbing - American Psycho is just twisted and Glamorama starts off okay but by the time Victor is in Europe... Ugh...

Seconding American Psycho and Coraline. House of Leaves is disturbing at times but I don't know if I was ever terrified of it.

House Of Leaves was supposed to be scary? o_O

zerky read it as an Urban Fantasy Romance.

Pet Sematary has this one scene, it's not so much scary as it is... well...

The protagonist (zerky can't even remember his name anymore), goes down to the real cemetery to dig up his dead son (who was killed by an oncoming truck), and then there's all this description about how he carefully gathers all these gravedigging tools. Then how he spends most of the night unearthing the coffin, and how he opens it up to see that the kid is stitched together poorly. There's some more description about how decayed the body is, plus how bad it smells, then the kid's dad throws up on the side of the coffin and bundles his son up to bury him proper. That was... very visceral in a way the rest of the novel failed to achieve.

Those Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books were also really awful, if only because of the illustrations. Dear Lord.

edited 18th Jan '12 7:06:51 PM by zerky

Pet Sematary is definitely my favorite Horror book.

After by Francine Prose is one hell of a nail-your-knuckles-to-the-covers read. Even the more improbable pseudoscience, once it comes in, can't really detract. (You may have had to attend K-12 or similar in the last decade for the really visceral reactions, but I think that's most of us.)

There are some slam-bang scary horror novels out there—Peter Straub's Ghost Story comes to mind. Usually, though, horror is too intense a reaction for a writer to consistently invoke over the length of a novel. The scariest stuff I've ever read was invariably a short story or novella.

A personal you'll-foul-your-Dockers top ten:

• Ramsay Campbell, "The Guardian"
• Robert W. Chambers, "The Yellow Sign"
• W.W. Jacobs, "The Monkey’s Paw"
• M.R. James, "The Mezzotint"[1]
• Thomas Ligotti, "Alice’s Last Adventure"
• Bentley Little, "The Theatre"
• H.P. Lovecraft, "The Haunter of the Dark"[2]
• Arthur Machen, "The Great God Pan"
• Edgar Allan Poe, "The Masque of the Red Death"[3]
• Clark Ashton Smith, "Genius Loci"

[1] You could substitute a dozen other James stories, including "A School Story," "Count Magnus," and "Oh Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad."

[2] Obviously, you could swap this out with several other Lovecraft stories.

[3] Ditto w/r/t Poe.

edited 19th Jan '12 9:58:25 AM by Jhimmibhob

There's a well-known Dutch novel by J. Bernlef called Hersenschimmen. It scared the living daylights out of me when I read it.

It's about an elderly man who slowly but surely loses his grip on reality due to Alzheimer's. And here's the catch: the entire story is told from his perspective. In fact, the story is told not through descriptions of events, but through changes in the style: the sentences get shorter and less coherent as the protagonist's mental faculties degenerate.

Now that, my friends, is terrifying. Hersenschimmen was translated into English as Out of Mind. I don't know how well the effect carries over in the translation.

I'm pretty hard to scare, but the first author I can think of who makes me think "How the hell can you write this stuff?" is George R.R. Martin. "Sandkings" in particular goes from mildly disturbing to just plain fucked-up.

(My favorite horror story is Full Tilt by Neal Shusterman, but I don't really like it as a horror story. I think of it as an adventure story that uses horror elements.)

edited 20th Jan '12 10:26:53 AM by feotakahari

Really :o When zerky was reading that, the only thing she was thinking was... "HNGGG! That is not how evolution works!"

I'm a fan of the usual 3 K.A.Applegate series, but they never actually scared me, maybe I'm just too cynical

House of leaves definitely had it's creepy as hell parts, like the creature in the storeroom at the tattoo place and the part where There wasn't any truck. The actual Navidson record parts never actually scared me though.

The end of the last Harry Potter though... All was well... It was too happy, and too overt & unsubtle about it. Usually it's implications that get me.

Fahrenheit 451. 1984. That one Animorphs book where Rachel gets kidnapped, meets Crayak, and is engulfed by a squishy gelatinous substance. Life Of Pi. That one Isaac Asimov book where there's two universes and a Pump that supplies infinite free energy.

Also, there were some terrifying parts of Watership Down.

Some of H.P. Lovecraft's stories have been pretty creepy, but it was Clive Barker's Mister B. Gone that made me feel threatened, and unsafe in my own house. Probably helps that I read it in one sitting.

@Jhimmibhob: We seem to have very similar taste... Have you ever read any Paul Bowles? "A Distant Episode" in particular, or maybe "Pages from Cold Point"? Granted, the subject matter is far from supernatural, but the writing has that same wonderful use of vocabulary and sense of ever-winding dread.

I thought that "The White People" was even more unsettling than "The Great God Pan", personally, though that may be due to the sheer malignant taunting quality of the narrative. "The Inmost Light" is fairly monstrous as well, though the true horror of that one lies in what is never actually said: What the occultist told to convince his wife to submit to the procedure. Think about it.

Speaking of the horror of implications, Joan Bernott's delicate little vignette "The Test Tube Creature, Afterward" from Harlan Ellison's brilliant Again Dangerous Visions is one of the most poignant and subtly 'upsettling' stories that I have read in a very long time.

edited 27th Jan '12 10:35:28 PM by JHM

JHM: I'm afraid I haven't tried out Bowles yet, but you've convinced me to put him on my list—thanks! You're right about The White People, though I'd rank it behind the Great God Pan, if only because of Machen's last-page Writer Cop Out ("She had poisoned herself—in time." Really, A.M.?).

Much of Ligotti's earliest, best stuff is out of print, but if you can get hold of Grimscribe or Songs of a Dead Dreamer, don't hesitate. I suspect the man's stuff will end up being remembered generations from now.

I was extremely young when I read Ellison's collection, but can scarcely remember any of it now; believe that'll be another one for my library list.

Oh, I'm well aware of how rare Ligotti's work is. Very aware. My hardback copy of The Agonising Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein and Other Gothic Tales should probably serve as the representative token of my degenerate obsession... Songs Of A Dead Dreamer is probably my favourite of his work, though all of it is pretty excellent.

(To those merely observing this geeky exchange, you need only know this: 'My name is Thoss. I am a doctor.")

That line in "The White People" always puzzled me. It seemed as if it were almost thrown in as an attempt to explain things, but just made everything more confusing. But the last lines of the journal... Oh, dear gods, that's whacked out.

The Dangerous Visions collections really are wonderful, though few of the things in them can strictly be called "horrific"—though most were, at the least, quietly insurrectionary. Piers Anthony's "In the Barn" is also pretty repulsive, for entirely different reasons.

edited 2nd Feb '12 12:42:04 PM by JHM

You ain't lying. Till the day I die, my wife will continue to find ways of referring derisively to SoaDD as my "27-dollar paperback." (And I'll never succeed in explaining what a bargain that was!)

And yes: even if Machen did Bowdlerize himself a little, The White People doesn't lose much power by it. The Great God Pan has more genuine shocks, but TWP leaves you uneasy and appalled in a way that feels like it'll never wholly dissipate. "Then I made faces like the faces on the rocks, and I twisted myself about like the twisted ones..." Good Christ.

edited 3rd Feb '12 8:24:46 AM by Jhimmibhob

It's been a while since I read it, but I remember being very disturbed by The Island Of Doctor Moreau and the details of those painful experiments he was performing, and the fact his "creations" were firmly in the Uncanny Valley.

Perdido Street Station is also pretty freaky.

Another one, Matheson's Born of Man and Woman.

edited 3rd Feb '12 4:53:09 PM by Jordan

That part. Whenever I write something in which I am aiming for a sense of deep unease, I remember that paragraph. It's... you almost want to know, but then you think about it and you really don't.

Do you mean the first or the second paperback edition? The second I recall getting for about the same—still lucky, but if you're talking about the first... your luck is the greater to mine, my friend.

I've wanted to read more Miéville for a long time, actually; his short story about the Via Ferra was extremely amusing, but due to surreal happenstance I've read little else of his.

M.R. James' short story collection, Casting The Runes has some terrifying examples how to properly tell a ghost story. Coraline was also pretty creepy, but I wouldn't say it was horrifying. Mythago Wood and the other books in the Rhyhope Wood Saga could be pretty terrifying. Lavondyss is full of terrifing things from being torn apart alive to painfully turning into a tree among other things.

I was not scared so much as disturbed profoundly by the sheer amount of violence in The Blood Meridian, although I guess that's kind of the point.

@JHM

You should do it. Read the Miéville, that is.

Perdido Street Station and its sequels are pretty much the only books zerky's ever seen actually going into the political workings/implications of steampunk. She cannot recommend the books highly enough.

edited 9th Feb '12 3:35:34 PM by zerky

... 27 dollars is just about standard for a paperback book here. Most of the books I buy new cost that much. The larger ones are thirty.

But how much is an Australian dollar worth?

About as much as a U.S. dollar, it turns out. Hm.

edited 9th Feb '12 7:50:07 PM by ImipolexG

I actually thought Coraline (book not movie) was pretty terrifying (it gave me a very vivid nightmare), and I was in my twenties when I read it. If I'd read it as a kid, which seems to be the target group, I would have been traumatised for a while.