Nightmare Fuel / Nightmares & Dreamscapes

• Rainy Season, where it begins raining frogs that devour a couple who've moved into a nice new house out in the country. It's not the idea of frogs with sharp teeth or the fact that the nice old couple down the road warn them... no, it's that its implied that this is a regular thing and that they routinely sacrifice people like this.
  • The epilogue reveals that the rains come every seven years, June 27th on the dot, and that an out of town couple always shows up the same day. The townspeople dont know why it happens, or how it started, but it's implied that the sacrifice is some sort of ritual that helps keep the town prosperous. Most of them hate it, and half-heartedly try to warn off the couples as they arrive but it never works because there's just no way to make "toad rain" sound belivable. On top of that, they're afraid that if the couple would leave, or if one just doesnt show up some year, the toads might not melt away when the sun comes up like they always do. Just one more bizarre local nightmare in the backroads of Stephen Kings America.
• In You Know They Got a Hell of a Band, a young couple finds Rock and Roll Heaven, an idyllic little Norman Rockwell town in Oregon, and it just happens to be populated by every dead rock-n-roll star! Cass Elliot, Janis Joplin, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, John Lennon... you name 'em, they're there! And they even put on an incredible show every single night, a show that keeps building and never seems to end! Everyone who visits gets to live there, forever young! It seems like every rocker's fantasy... except it's really Nightmare Fuel: The rock-n-roll icons are all rotten, indestructible corpses who prevent anyone from leaving. All living people are given menial jobs around town, and are required to attend the concert every night. If you try to help a newcomer escape, you get a finger amputated. Everyone eventually turns into a blank, hopeless shell that can never escape the town, not even through death.
  • This exchange is what seals the deal:
    Mary: How long have you been here, Sissy?
    Sissy: I don't know. It's easy to lose track of time. Six years at least. Or maybe it's eight. Or nine.
    Mary: How old were you when you came?
    Sissy: Twenty-three.
    Mary: And how old are you now?
    Sissy: Twenty-three.
  • There's also the equally haunting response to the classic "Rock n' Roll will never die!" mantra that makes up the last line of the story.
    That's what I'm afraid of. That's exactly what I'm afraid of.
  • It gets even more chilling when Sissy mentions that Frankie Lymon amputated her finger. She explains that he was "the nicest guy" while alive... but something happens to the dead rockers upon arriving in Rock and Roll Heaven and changes them into cruel, malicious, hateful beings that love to torture their human prisoners just for the hell of it. By all accounts, some of the musicians who appear in the story and its television adaptation were among the kindest, socially conscious, and passionate celebrities who ever lived—and now they've all become monsters. And there's no indication that any of them can, or even want to, change back.
  • An especially gruesome detail is that the story was published in January 1992, a couple of months after Freddy Mercury's passing, and he appears among the many performers Alan Freed lists, "just in from London-town". A long, protracted death by disease, or even natural causes ("[Freed] chanted the names of the young ones and the old ones"), still won't save a singer from ending up in Rock and Roll Heaven just like any 27 Club member.
• The Moving Finger: Howard Mitla goes to the sink and sees a finger sticking out of the plughole. Just tapping around. Then it grows until it has about ten knuckles and starts attacking him. He pours drain cleaner down the plughole in an attempt to destroy it and then chops it to bits with some hedge-clippers, which only makes the situation worse. Eventually someone calls the cops on the guy, and the story ends with the guy gibbering about the finger. Then the toilet seat moves. And the last line is about one of the cops lifting the lid.
• Suffer the Little Children is extremely creepy and disturbing. It involves an elderly schoolteacher's students changing into something 'different' and start acting malevolently and speaking bizarrely. The teacher ends up killing many of the children one by one because she is convinced they have been taken over by something alien. We do not know whether the teacher was insane or whether something was going on.
  • The ending is also quite chilling with Miss Sidley being committed, then deciding to work with disabled children...and then she seems quite disturbed and asks to leave. Miss Sidley ends up cutting her throat on a piece of cut glass and the psychiatrist starts noticing the way that two little girls are giggling...
• Crouch End, one of King's occasional homages to the works of Lovecraft. It's set around the small London hamlet called Crouch End, and the police force stationed there, most notably the veteran cop Vetter and the rookie Farnham. One stuffy summer night, a hysterical American woman named Doris stumbles into the station, looking like she's been through hell, and babbling about how her husband has disappeared. Eventually, she calms down enough to tell what happened; she and her husband Lonnie had been looking for the home of one of Lonnie's business associates, but when they stopped to make a call from a phone box, the cab they had been using has suddenly disappeared, and the neighborhood seems to have...changed... As Vetter explains to Farnham when talking about the woman's story, there's something wrong with Crouch End, every now and then, people will just vanish from the area, and on the off chance that they ever come back, they've become unhinged from the experience. As Doris's story reveals, they find themselves in a subtly "off" and deserted version of Crouch End, that becomes increasingly warped and nightmarish the more the unlucky visitor tries to find their way out, and that's not even touching on the few things that do live there... Vetter himself believes that Crouch End might be one of the places where our reality borders on another, nightmarish dimension, a place where the fabric of time and space is "thinner", and the other dimension can leak into ours. Farnham dismisses the story as pure fantasy, but starts to wonder why Vetter has been gone to the cigarette kiosk so long. He goes outside, and finds the neighborhood strangely deserted. He notices that the streetlights at the top of the street have gone out. He goes to investigate, turns the corner... and is never seen again. Vetter returns a few minutes later, but Farnham is nowhere to be found. He retires soon after, and dies of a heart attack six months later. Doris returns to America, where she attempts suicide, before spending time in a mental hospital and tries to put the memory of Crouch End behind her. In Crouch End, people still lose their way from time to time. Some lose their way forever...
  • Before things start happening, Doris notices a strange headline on a newspaper saying "SIXTY LOST IN UNDERGROUND HORROR." It's presumably about an accident in the subway, but the unsettling wording sticks with her.
  • Lonnie goes insane after he encounters some unseen entity beyond a garden hedge, yelling at Doris to run, and when they stop several minutes later, he refuses to explain exactly what he saw beyond the hedge. A little while later, when Doris mentions it again, Lonnie cant remember what she's talking about; whatever he saw was so horrible his mind had already blocked it out.
  • The two creepy children, and the biker that Doris glimpses as having a rat face for a second.
  • Vetter talking to Farnham about the other world that neighbors Crouch End, and compares it to a spot on a rubber ball where the rubber has worn away to almost nothing.
    Vetter: And sometimes I think... wouldnt it be a day, if one day the last of the rubber just... ''wears off'? Wouldnt it be a day, Farnham?
  • Doris mentions that one of the road signs she saw in the Other Crouch End said "Slaughter Towen". Vetter brings this up to one of the other cops on duty, and he reveals that a "towen" is the ceremonial area where the druids once practiced human sacrifice.
• Dolan's death in "Dolan's Cadillac". Yes, he was a ruthless, murderous crime lord, but being buried alive is a bad way for anyone to go. There's an especially disturbing part where the main character returns to the stretch of road where Dolan and his car are buried, and hears that Dolan is STILL ALIVE beneath the dirt. He covers the spot with asphalt, and leaves him there to slowly suffocate in the darkness.
  • There's something undeniably creepy about how the protagonist is the only person who will ever know what happened to Dolan. After Dolan disappears, a disc jockey even compares him to Jimmy Hoffa.
• Dedication isn't really meant to be scary as much as unsettling, but there is one VERY creepy scene where the protagonist talks about her return to the old voodoo witch's apartment one last time. Nobody answers the door, even after she knocks twice, so she leans down to slide an envelope of money under it and the old woman's voice comes from RIGHT ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DOOR, like she's kneeling down as well. The protagonist even describes it as "a voice coming out of a grave". The witch isn't evil but she's definitely creepy.
  • Finding out that a witch has cast a spell on you that compels you to eat a racist white man's semen can count as this, as well as Nausea Fuel - the protagonist has no idea why she's being forced to do this, and actually describes one instance of it as her sternly telling herself that she can resist it before dissociating and coming back to herself to find she's already done it.
• Home Delivery: One of the last news broadcast that reaches Jenny Island is a CNN reporter going Laughing Mad as he reveals that Bill Clinton (not named but heavily implied to be the President), his wife, several cabinet members and visiting foreign officials have been devoured by zombies breaking into the White House and killing everyone inside, before the reporter runs off, leaving the camera showing an empty desk. Making this even more bizarre is that this wasn't some crisis meeting to respond to the Zombie Apocalypse, it was an entirerly normal political affair. It's not clear if this was some desperate attempt by the President to enforce normalcy, or if they were genuinely deluded that things were under control.
  • Maddie is forced to kill her own zombified husband, who drowned in a boating accident before the outbreak began, and returns to her as little more than a water-logged skeleton with some brain matter leaking out of his eye sockets. She never reveals this to her neighbors, and simply buries his body in an old well beneath their house.
  • The source of the zombies is Star Wormwood, a massive colony of alien worms in orbit above the South Pole, that infest human corpses. As a result, unlike most zombie fiction, the zombies DON'T always die from being shot in the head, and the ones that don't have to be dismembered and burned, otherwise they'll just keep coming, no matter how many pieces they're in. Even the ashes can still move. Oh, and this also means that while their bites don't spread the zombie plague, every corpse on Earth will rise as a zombie as long as there's any flesh left, even if they were dead and buried before the dead began to rise.

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