The Most Horrific, Scariest, And Down Right Terrifying Books

When I was a kid, I read Pet Sematary from cover to cover in a night, and was more frightened and wigged out than a book has ever made me since. On the other hand, it was the first genuine horror novel I'd ever read, so it's hard to decide if the book was really that powerful, or if novelty accounted for most of it.

People who I know who have read Pet Sematary agree that the first third or so of the novel (up until just after the son dies) is probably King's strongest and scariest work of fiction, though they also tend to point out (when they actually managed to get past that point) that the rest of the book is just kind of a let-down. Freaky, yes, but not half as scary as that first part.

Same thing with most of the reviews I've read of it, too.

edited 29th Jun '12 3:40:20 AM by JHM

Pet Sematary is on the list of books I will not only never read again if I can help it - ok, I would if someone pointed a gun at my head and I knew it was real, what can I say, I am a coward, but look forward to it going out of print.

Um, uh, why...?

Yeah, I wouldn't rely on my youthful reactions to the book. But even now, I don't think the book really suffers near the end. There's something powerful about the story's downward momentum: everyone is doomed, and the last third of the book is relentless in showing it—there's never a sense that anyone could ever have saved himself or chosen differently. That seems like a structural weakness of sorts, but it certainly makes the events seem all the more terrible.

Fahrenheit 451 made me collapse into a panic-attack before the end of the first paragraph.

Burning books...

I swear, if I ever reach the end of the first page of that book, I'll be a wreck.

edited 2nd Jul '12 2:16:56 PM by ATC

Most of the scariest books I've read have been about economics or politics.

Terrifying indeed.

However, The Colour Out Of Space, while only a short story, is one work that I found genuinely scary.

The most genuinely, Not-Sure-I-Want-To-Read-This, terrifying books I've read, though, have been on the subject of the bee population collapse.

Royally fucked we are, mmmm.

edited 2nd Jul '12 11:57:12 PM by InverurieJones

"The Colour out of Space" was the second Lovecraft story I read, and it scared me quite a bit, even though I read it in plain daylight. Granted, I was a lot younger then, but I still get a bit of a chill thinking about some of the worse parts, like when the protagonist finds the remains of the farmer's wife in the attic.

edited 3rd Jul '12 1:22:36 AM by DoktorvonEurotrash

The Gone series is pretty chilling in its portrayal of society gone mad. Basically, all of the adults disappear in a small town in California, and the children are sealed into the 314-square-mile area. Then some of them develop powers. There's some pretty nasty Body Horror in some of the later books too.

Unwind. The chapter where Roland is unwound is told from his perspective. I nearly vomited.

edited 25th Jul '12 7:30:43 PM by lalalei2001

I can read it casually now, but World War Z was pretty frightening the first time I read it. Likewise for the Zombie Survival Guide. I don't think it helped that I flipped open to the story where That girl in Canada om nom noms on people to survive

In particular, it was the realization that zombies didn't just bite you once and you went-you would be eaten alive until you blacked out from the pain or bled out if such a situation occured. One of the great failures of my parents was their letting me pick up that book at a very young age, haha.

I gotta say IT is by far the scariest book I've ever read. "We all float down here..." *shiver*

The original Dracula is still surprisingly scary—even though you've seen every bit of it copied by parodists and homages. It's also quite readable compared to most Victorian fiction I've tried. Dickens may rank higher on the "Great Literature" scale, but I found Bram Stoker far more accessible and engaging.

For contemporary writers, I like early King, and It is definitely high on my list, but I think Dan Simmons may have done the best job of scaring me with his monsters. Carrion Comfort was scary enough that I had trouble finishing it, and The Hyperion Cantos is the scariest version of The Canterbury Tales ever written. :)

edited 10th Aug '12 1:35:49 AM by Xtifr

My father reckons On The Beach was just about the most disturbing book he's ever read, so disturbing in fact that he junked it immediately after he'd read it, despite being a Shute fan.

edited 10th Aug '12 2:24:03 AM by MattII

Peter Straub's Ghost Story drags in several places, is often vague where it shouldn't be, and has become something of a Unintentional Period Piece. On the other hand, throughout it are scattered several of the scariest moments and isolated scenes in literature. And though the story's ambiguity is often a weakness, it occasionally yields genuine, lasting terror (what did Alma Mobley really say at the window that night?).

Demonata ^_^

edited 27th Aug '12 11:32:39 AM by Weirdowithcoffee

Lets Go Play At The Adams is not exactly terrifying, but it is certainly very disturbing.

edited 11th Sep '12 5:29:45 AM by AnEditor

In hindsight, I found I enjoyed the novel greatly. At the time however, I found The Keep by F. Paul Wilson to be incredibly terrifying. Not a good book for someone who is both claustrophobic and afraid of the dark.

Oh, The Keep is a good one. Scariest at the start I think, when you don't know what is causing everything to happen. Although the cold efficiency with which the dead slaughter the living soldiers is certainly scary in its own way.

Well, this old book I read, Wayfarer Redemption, was actually pretty scary now that I look back on it. Its rather like if you took a rather formulaic at first fantasy novel, a J-Horror movie, and most of the categories of Nightmare Fuel, blended it together, and made a slurry of the result.

• Spoilers due to squick: First and foremost, the Time-Keeper Demons. They use fog to turn animals and people into their depraved minions. Some of these animals only kill children and hide inside the corpse. The Time-Keepers have on demand Body Horror going on, from sprouting udders to defile a sacred lake to tentacles for some decidedly NSFW things. They're brutal. They're no nonsense about getting their even more horrible leader back. Its like they set out to invent new standards in sick and wrong.

• This is worse than the above: Speaking of that leader of the Demons, Qeteb is...just sickening. His "birth" is disgusting. The Demons basically go around befouling places and throwing a baby into pools of blood, and it slowly grows into a "suitable vessel", while becoming just a little bit more alive and more obviously a case of Came Back Wrong. And just for the lulz, when the Demons had nothing better to be doing, they made it have sex with Wolf Star's wife. Its even worse because Niah's dead too! When he's finally brought back, his body stretches and contorts to fit massive black armor.

• Star-Laughter. Ugh...ugh...that woman is ten different kinds of evil. It takes a special kind of villain to ally with six omnicidal demons to eradicate your own people. And...is she fucking trying to nurse her dead baby on her breast? And then she turns her dead baby into the above Qeteb, who seems to have a thing for weird, almost Mind Game Ship level manipulations of her. And do remember, he's her dead son's forcibly aged up body.

• Wolf-Star: Before the Demons, there was this manipulative, secretive monster. If its not the fact he can disguise himself flawlessly as absolutely anyone, its the fact that he can appear out of nowhere and crush your head into bloody paste if you stand in the way of his schemes. And there's his mad science experiments with a portal.

No one else freaked out by Blindsight?

Unwind by Neal Shusterman. The whole concept of taking conscious living things (teenagers) apart and putting the still-living organs (including brain matter) into other living things.

His other major series is quite creepy too.

edited 30th Jan '15 8:37:15 PM by Bk-notburgerking

Patriotism by Mishima Yukio. The suicide scene was really hard to get through. The story itself is only short but ugh...

The Girl Next Door, for similar reasons as Let's Go Play at the Adams'.

In regards to Guts, the explanation I usually heard about the fainting was that admonition at the beginning to "hold your breath until I finish this story" and people going along with that.

It wasn't the scariest, but the Mara Dyer trilogy is intense. I read all three books yesterday. Despite the gore and terror, it was worth it.