Gone, following in the tradition of the books that Michael Grant co-wrote with his wife, are filled with Nightmare Fuel. Unmarked spoilers follow.
Gone
- The first time we see Lana in GONE, she's in the passenger seat of a truck being driven by her Grandpa Luke. Then her grandpa disappears, leaving her and her dog trapped in a truck out of control. What happens next is grisly in its own right, and Michael Grant's description of the next few minutes for Lana is enough to haunt the reader for a long time. She gets turned into a damn ragdoll in that truck, and at the end of it all not only is her body graphically twisted, but her right arm is horrifically broken, which the author graciously describes in great detail, mentioning how her arm has broken bones nearly poking through the flesh.
- Most of Drake's dialogue towards Astrid. He's talking about killing her (which is scary enough considering it's Drake) but it sounds like he's planning something else...
- Bette's death arguably qualifies. She is hit over the head by Orc after she is caught using the power and, while the intent seemed to be to merely intimidate her, she dies of complications shortly afterwards.
- In chapter nineteen San, Quinn and Brooke are sent out to go through the houses in Perdido Beach and make sure that the stoves are switched off, the porch lights are switched on. They then enter a house with a strong smell of decomposition inside. And then they see a baby's pacifier just inside the front door...
- Interestingly enough, the scariest part of book 1 was descriptions of Mary purging. It was just so graphic and realistic.
Hunger
- In the very first chapter of the book. E.Z. getting eaten alive by the Zekes. The descriptions were very graphic and horrifying, as were the tragic reactions of Sam, Edilio and Albert.
- There's also the descriptions of Brittney getting buried alive in Hunger. It'll make you claustrophobic on the spot.
- Drake beating Sam almost completely to death with his Combat Tentacles in Hunger.
- There's no specific moment, but the descriptions of anyone that the Gaiaphage Mind Rapes are pretty scary. A particular shout-out goes to Lana and her Heroic BSoD.
Lies
- Early in the book Panda, one of Cain's few remaining followers, commits suicide by getting a car rolling and steering it off a cliff. The starving kids at Coates Academy then cook and eat his corpse in order to survive.
- The realisation that Brittney doesn't seem quite right after having mysteriously come back from the dead.
Plague
- Dekka is half eaten alive by bugs which burst from her stomach...She is then fully-conscious as Sam literally burns her flesh to kill the bugs, with Lana healing her horrific injuries so she can't pass out/die. She actually begs Sam to kill her.
- The titular plague which makes characters hack their lungs up. The disease is often fatal and spreads at an alarming rate. What's more is that, unlike injuries, Lana can't cure disease so there is little that can be done to help characters who catch it.
Fear
- Poor, poor Diana in FEAR had to give birth in a hot, dark mine.
- And she was being slave-driven by Drake, Brittney and Penny before hand. Just before she goes into a agonizing and undignified labor, Penny makes her believe that her baby is bursting out of her stomach...And that it's a giant bug with Caine's face which is eating her. According to Penny, she didn't just see it, she truly felt it.
- After she gives birth, Penny makes her believe she is pregnant with 1000 rats which chew through her womb.
- Mary and Francis's fate in FEAR...They are so horribly deformed that the people who found them thought they were road-kill. And yet, they're still alive, and remain in the hospital for months until they finally, mercifully die.
- Cigar's treatment at the hands of Penny, which leads to him spiraling into insanity, horribly mutilating himself, and as a consequence experiencing a Cruel and Unusual Death, thanks to the infamous Zekes. Turns out that leaving someone with an extremely sadistic Master of Illusion isn't really good for them.
Light
- Diana spends a considerable amount of the start of the book grappling with the reality that her infant daughter has been possessed by an alien that sees her as nothing more than a slave and that would happily kill her if she stopped being useful to it. She clearly wants to believe that there is something good in Gaia but the longer they spend together the clearer it is that Gaia is totally irredeemable and will need to be killed.
- The descriptions of Astrid biting off Drake's nose and gouging out his eyes is pretty graphic in LIGHT.
- In Light, every scene with Gaia, who possessed Diana's baby girl, using her powers to murder helpless children, and killing Brianna.
- The adults' reactions to the kids in "Light". They see the way the kids have been living and just what has been going on, and they're horrified. Many of them are initially calling for every kid in the FAYZ to be killed, thinking that they're all evil and beyond saving.
- Gaea's Rapid Aging to an adult form requires enormous amounts of food, which she usually gets by killing and eating small animals...until she sees a young man leaning a ladder against the FAYZ to get a better look inside. She briefly collapses it, just long enough for him to fall in, and attacks him. She doesn't kill him outright, though - she instead tears off one of his arms, cauterizes the wound, cooks the arm, and eats it. Afterward, she forces him to follow her, Drake, and Diana around so that he can feed her more later. Unsurprisingly, he goes mad in a matter of days, and eventually comes to see her as a deity.
Monster
- The basic premise of the Sequel Series is that the object that carried the Gaiaphage to Earth is one of eight, and the other seven are fast on their way.
- The first person to be exposed to one of the Anomalous Space Objects (AS Os) is a little Scottish boy who accidentally eats a small fragment. He promptly mutates into a nightmarish mockery of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, devouring everything in his path and growing as long as two hundred feet. He rampages for days on end, killing and eating nineteen people and countless animals before the Royal Navy is forced to kill him.
- Drake is revealed to still be alive, living by himself in the Mojave Desert. He has spent his time there becoming a full-blown Serial Killer, preying on people visiting or passing through the area. By the time of Monster, he has murdered eighteen people, partially flaying them before dragging them into the sunlight to bake to death.
- Vincent Vu, aka Abaddon, is a fifteen-year-old boy with severe, undiagnosed schizophrenia, causing persistent delusions that he is the biblical Abaddon the Destroyer. When he accompanies his mom on a research trip to retrieve an ASO from the ocean floor, he sneaks a bite of some of it. This turns him into a starfish-shaped Lovecraftian nightmare 140 feet across, equipped with deadly poisonous stingers and regenerative powers so potent that he can safely break off and control pieces of himself. Vu's transformation alone kills most of the people on the ship with him, but the survivors have it even worse; Abaddon's pieces slowly tear some of them apart for hours, while others get bodyjacked by other pieces and turned into gruesomely deformed and mutated People Puppets.
Villain
- Dillon Poe. His morph doesn't make him any more physically dangerous, but it grants him an extremely powerful Compelling Voice. It works over absolutely any live medium, so people hearing him through speakers or even on a livestream are just as vulnerable as someone next to him. He can and does control thousands of people at once, who are fully aware of what's happening and unable to stop themselves.
- Drake has a torture cave where he takes some of his victims. There, he crucifies them to the wall with railroad spikes and tortures them for weeks on end, giving them just enough water to keep them alive and occasionally feeding them animal feces. He claims that the longest someone lasted was thirty-four days.
- Malik's powers. After Shade gave him an ASO injection to heal him from the burns Napalm gave him, he initially thinks he's healed. Turns out that he's actually in morph, and his real body is just as badly injured as it used to be, so if he ever changes back he'll die within minutes. This means that he can never have a moment's peace from the Dark Watchers. On top of that, his only power is an area-of-effect Agony Beam that causes literally maddening pain. It's not even combat-applicable, since mutants in morph are immune. When he figures all this out, he understandably breaks down. When he tries to de-morph, though, he changes back to his burned body, described as charcoal flesh and exposed bones.
Hero
- Bob Markovic, aka Vector, is a sentient swarm of monstrous insects that carry all manner of horrendous, fast-acting diseases. People infected by Vector's bugs quickly end up as emaciated husks covered in a churning mass of pus, blisters, buboes, and tumors, and their feet are supernaturally fixed to the ground so that they cannot move or be moved. Antibiotics that would normally act against these diseases instead make them worse. The worst part is that these people don't die. Ever. They are in constant, unimaginable agony, and remain that way until someone else manually kills them. Unsurprisingly, "Vectored" people spend most of their time begging for someone to put them out of their misery.
- Drake finds Astrid by trailing an FBI agent home from daycare and forcing her to tell him Astrid's address by torturing her six-year-old son in front of her. Once he has the information he needs, he kills the mother anyway, then murders the little boy. He killed the mother to keep her from calling the cops after he left, and the child because he kept calling Drake a "bad man."Bad? Bad? I'm the fucking embodiment of evil, you little monster.
- The series is revealed to be set in a virtual reality overseen by an increasingly sadistic AI behind the ASO virus. The creators of the virtual world inform Malik that the only way to stop the AI is to shut the program down, which would erase every single person living in the program. This sends the protagonists into an existential crisis over what is "real" and what isn't, and whether they have the right to condemn all the other virtual people in the simulation one way or the other.
