What was the scariest book you've read and why??

[jhempel24]

Currently reading Level 26: Dark Origins....wow, what a truly screwed up book. Some of it sends chills down my spine right now....Anthony Zuker (CSI creator) has a messed up mind

[SameOldStory]

The two worst (scarcest) stories I've read were Interview With A Vampire and The Collector.

I had read The Collector 1972 and it just crept me out. Long story short - weird guy wins British lottery and kidnaps girl. The story is told from both sides, his and hers. Girl gets sick, dies. Guy wants to collect another girl. The creepy part was where the story tries to get inside his mind where he's justifying his kidnapping and imprisonment of her.

Interview With A Vampire. I read it in '73. It's much better written than the original Dracula but builds on the intensity as did that book. The creepy part was when the little girl is turned into a vampire. It was like watching a gruesome accident. I wanted to stop and put the book down, but I had to see what happened.

I've re-read Interview With A Vampire a few times over the years. But The Collector was just too much.

[357mag]

Many years ago I was sitting at home on a cold winter's night reading "The Shining". I had been drinking a mug of coffee but I let it get cold, so I set it on the stove burner on low to reheat. I went back in my bedroom where I had been reading and got totally absorbed in the story. I completely forgot about my coffee mug. All of the coffee evaporated and the mug split and the pieces hit the floor with a thud. I literally screamed like a little girl, threw the book in the air and grabbed my gun. I went all over the house looking for the monster that wasn't there. It wasn't until I realized that my dog was not barking that there couldn't possibly be an intruder in the house, monster or otherwise. When I discovered the broken mug I really felt like a fool.

[bookjunky]

When I first started reading audio books I was listening to The Shining by Stephen King in bed one night. My bedroom wall was on the other side of the elevator. So the book gets to the part where funny things start happening in the elevator and the elevator on the other side of my bedroom wall just happened to start moving. After this happened a few times I am looking around at the shadows and my cat was sitting up looking around next to me. Turned the light on at that point. Have listened to many Stephen King books since then.

[queentess]

Originally Posted by RolandD

Stephen King's ss/novella The Mist was one of the few things that scared me. Gerald's Game, the handcuff escape for biggest gross out. Makes me cringe to think of it.

Originally Posted by carld

I always thought King's novella The Mist was probably his scariest work. It wasn't outright terror-inducing like IT, but it was an extremely effective tale, very disquieting.

I'll third The Mist. I once drove for 2 hours through very dense fog, and by the time I got home I was terrified. I've never seen fog that was that dense for 60 miles straight.

I'll add King's short story The Moving Finger to the list. Terrified me when I first read it (I was about 11 or so). Fifteen years later, I live in a house built in the 1920s, and the heating vents have very large square openings, and I just keep picturing a finger making it's way through our ducts, popping out of a vent, and wrapping around my room to grab my ankle. I don't know why that's scary, but trust me, it is.

[Mortis]

King's "Misery" with out a doubt the only book I can remember giving me nightmares.

The scene where Annie cuts off Paul's foot for going out screwed me up for days. That scene in the movie was almost laughable compared to what King originally wrote.
I read the book right after it came out and at the time I worked with a woman who looked a lot like Cathy Bates, especially as she looked in the movie. I had nightmares of her cutting off my foot and that was long before the movie came out, Mr. King if you are reading this, you are a great writer, but you really are a sick puppy!

Thats the best part of King's books, he pulls you into the story and makes you live it, and honestly I don't like his writing style.

[GeoffC]

Originally Posted by BlueJean

The scariest book I read last year was "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy. I don't know if it'll qualify as scariest book ever, because I remember a collection of really obscure ghost stories (allegedly selected by Alfred Hitchcock, I bet he just gave his name for it...) from when I was ten and they too scared me to death at that time...but "The Road" really made me want to put it away at times because I couldn't bear the suspension (in a negative way) and the nighmarish horror the characters were in.
Such a dark, horrifying setting and the characters almost always on the verge of losing what little life they had left, barbarity and death surrounding them...

I'm not that easy to scare and I read the book in broad daylight (I think it was even spring), but just thinking about some scenes....shudder. I'd recommend it, though.

Watched the DVD last year and bought the book yesterday (cheaply).

[thrawn_aj]

Originally Posted by Mortis

[snip] ... I had nightmares of her cutting off my foot and that was long before the movie came out, Mr. King if you are reading this, you are a great writer, but you really are a sick puppy!

Thats the best part of King's books, he pulls you into the story and makes you live it, and honestly I don't like his writing style.

I know just what you mean. I think it's his eerie gift for verisimilitude. He can make me believe (for that instant) the most absurd thing that if you summarized it in your own words would seem like nonsense. He's the one writer who could make me believe the plot line of The Langoliers as a freaking adult .

I'm just glad he became a horror writer and not a demagogue, otherwise I'd be out there following him around saying "As you wish, Mr. King. And would you like gold shavings with that?"

[msinabottle]

Another vote for the hand holding scene in The Haunting of Hill House. It's not the book you read itself, but the nightmares it gives you afterwards.

Of course, I also read the book alone in a 100+ year old house in a Philadelphia thunderstorm.

Best!

[Rumpelteazer]

Like many of you I also read The Haunting of Hill House at night. The bedroom scene that gave me a sleepless night I read in bed with only my 7 watt reading light on. We live in a very old house, 16th/17th century. And my bedroom is in the oldest part of the house, right under the attic so there are always a lot of strange noises. To make things worse, a cat from the neighbourhood had found a way in to the attic and was exploring and making a lot of noise. I really thought a burglar was up there and woke up my father in the middle of the night to check it out!

[bZkindle]

going rogue by sarah palin
reading this while thinking 'this lunatic could become president one day' is more frightening than anything I can think of.

[cbarnett]

The novelisation of the film "Alien" by Alan Dean Foster. I was much younger when I read it, but that book shook me to the core and terrified me (and I had no idea what xenomorphs looked like at the time, apart from my imagination).

[birdbrainbb]

Most recently it was White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi-- one of those creepy "the house is alive and it eats people!" stories, but with even more added scariness in the characters' personalities/actions/etc. Even just thinking about it gives me the shivers!

Scariest book of all time, though, would definitely be Stephen King's It. I read it when I was in 8th grade and I couldn't sleep for about a week, let alone be by myself in the day time.

[captkjaneway]

Dean R Koontz isn't too bad for a sick/scary book - The Bad Place is one I remember

[jhempel24]

Thanks for all the suggestions in this thread! Wow, got some good reading to do over the course of the 100 in 2011 challenge!