Has any book ever literally given you chills?

[CheerfulYank]

For me it's Stephen King's Dead Zone, about a man, Johnny, who wakes up from a coma with psychic powers.

(SPOILERS)

He's working as a tutor for a high school boy later on and he tells his student not to go to the graduation party as the restaurant will burn down. No one believes him, but the boy and about half the class come to an alternate party at the boy's house because they're scared. The rest of the class goes to the restaurant.

Johnny and the boy's father are playing cards while chaperoning the alternative party and a radio announcement interrupts to say that the worst fire in the state's history has broken out at the restaurant, and almost everyone there is dead.

I haven't explained it that well, but for some reason ( and I've read it a few times) I literally get goosebumps at that bit. Every time!

Anyone else have this or just me? :o

I don't read scary books but Notes on a Scandal gave me the chills as the Cate B character doesn't get away like she does in the film.

I found it really chilling and depressing at the end.

I agree about the shack. It's a run of the mill horrible book - really horrible at the beginning, but then the whole religious, yes, manipulation. It made me believe less in god than I did before to be honest.

1000 Splendid Suns. I was physically sick after some of the beatings, them being locked in the room, being forced to chew stones...still can't bear to think about it.

Re: The Shack, the OP is asking for books that gave you the chills. Crap or not, what happened to his daughter did just that to me. The babysitter book was also a crappy book but I've never forgotten the horror of it.

Just read about Sylvia Likens. What a terrible story :(

i too read Lets Go Play at the Adams in a psychiactric hospital, found it somewhere while working as a cleaner during the uni holidays and read it on my breaks. Eerie, and yep it has stuck with me for a long time.

Before having children, American Psycho was the single most chilling book i ever read. I had to finish it just to get it done and over with and out of my life. Hideous.

Since having children... Sebastian Faulks' Charlotte Grey. Not the story of Charlotte, but the subplot of the two little Jewish brother being protected and betrayed and hunted and eventually turned over to the Nazis, then their journey to the camps... the big brother (only about 6 years old) trying so hard to protect his little brother from the horror of it all. My boys were 5 and 2 when I read it and it left me distraught. I couldn't go back and read it now, and even find it hard to talk about to people. Utterly utterly awful things that people do to each other.

The most disturbing book I've read is The Collector by John Fowles. Horrible! About a man kidnapping a woman that he has supposedly fallen in love with.

God, definitely the Road. I just felt total and utter despair at the end. I cried and cried and couldn't stop. No other book has ever affected me so much.

The Collector, a psycho in the making but doesn't know it. I wonder if he went on to kidnap the new M? Magnificently creepy.

The Rendezvous by Daphne du Maurier. The bit at the end when she finally realises. Sad and terrifying at the same time. Let me know if you want a spoiler, happy to divulge. Brilliant story.

Read a short story called Examination Day by Henry Seslar when I was a TA as part of GCSE English. The kids were all at the end, while I went all hot and cold.

Chipandspuds, I was just about to mention The Collector! One of the only times I've finished a book and actually had a whole body shudder.

And Hotdog78, I was also about to mention Daphne du Maurier. The endings of her short stories are particularly chilling. Have you read The Blue Lenses?

We Need to Talk About Kevin here too. I remember seeing a thread here titled 'I need to talk about we need to talk about Kevin' - it was a really haunting book.

Not sure if it's already been mentioned but James Herbert's Crickley Hall really bothered me. Possibly because I'd seen the TV dramatisation of it first, but it's not often a book does that to me. So much so, I couldn't finish it.

DH read Crickley Hall, and said it was chilling. His kind of book, but said not my sort. I couldn't even finish watching it on tv

IT by King - just really creepy. Anything by Richard Laymond makes my toes curl, his writing was so vivid, he is no longer with us. I don't think I've read a horror book where it's been too gory, boring maybe but I've been reading horror since I was 13. I am perfectly normal of course

And Walkers by graham masterton, that have me shivers, and a PP up thread mentioned Lovecraft - Brow Jenkins. Another Masterton book, Prey, that was pretty horrific in places.

Life After Life - the scene in Germany where they are starving to death.

Jude - most particularly the note, but the whole book is devastating.

Birdsong - the scene about the night before the battle of the Somme

Stephen King's sequel to 'The Shining' called 'Doctor Sleep' when they are torturing and murdering the young boy. His voice became a hoarse croak after screaming for so long.

I threw the book on the floor it upset me so much.

Lovecraft.

The two times I have read his stories late at night the book has ended up once in the freezer and once out the window. Then it needs to be surrounded by 'safe' books on my shelves.

After a while I forget and read it again, my brain goes 'I know the plot, it's not that bad, lizards for gods sake and tentacled monsters'

And I end up quivering at 3am, wide awake, back against the wall.

Also Pig Island, and a horror story I read a while back about tiny insects that laid maggots in people's brains, they burrowed around and the people became more and more damaged. Finally the insects escaped through the mouth in a massive cloud and entered their next victim. And The Road of course. And world war z. And a Rhiannon frater book has the most upsetting opening passage ever, a mother on one side of the door, her zombified children on the other. Wail. Made a better zombie plan after that one.

There's a short story by F Scott Fitzgerald, about a couple who are given a cut glass bowl for their wedding. It's a beautiful bowl but over the years it seems to play a part in all their misfortunes, in one way or another.

Right up to the time their son is in the armed forces and away at war, and a telegram arrives from the Army. The maid puts it in the bowl ready for when the couple come home home and as soon as the mother realises what it is in the bowl she knows he's been killed. He has to be dead, because the telegram is in that bowl. I think she slaps the maid and then throws the bowl to the ground and smashes it.

It's not a horror story, or even a frightening one, but I got the chills every time I read that story at the same moment, when she is told the telegram is in the bowl and she just knows immediately that it means her son has been killed.

Someone mentioned Mo Hayder as being 'torture porn' and although I haven't read any of her books I would have to put Richard Layman on the same list. I won't read his books anymore because his books are all very definitely rape porn under the guise of horror.

The part in IT that really bothers me is the part where Patrick has trapped a puppy and is watching it slowly die. When it licks his hand. I hate that bit. I blame that book for a nightmare I had when we got our puppy and I dreamed he accidentally got stuck under our floorboards.

And the bit in The Stand where the characters have to walk through a long tunnel, in the dark, not knowing who might be in there waiting. And Lloyd, in prison, thinking about the dead rabbit and hearing Randal Flagg coming for him.

Just found this thread and I'm going to have to add some of these to my Goodreads 'want to read' list.

Noticed many posters said 'We need to talk about Kevin' - I couldn't get into it, I don't like diary style books but the film was creepy.

I found the following books played on my mind long after I had finished:

The Girl Next Door - Jack Ketchum
Famine - Graham Masterton
The Treatment - Mo Hayder

House of leaves by mark danielewski. Tried to read it in uni and had to go leave it in the common room after twenty pages as I didn't want it in my room. Spent two months feeling like common room was still too close. Also a kids book of ghost stories I read as a child that had a story about a boy who throws away an ant farm and then the ants climb back into his room while he's sleeping, hold open his eyelids and nibble out the backs of his eyes in revenge. Never forgotten that one. There was a picture too.

Dark Matter by Michelle Paver.

the only book I have thrown across a room, just to get it the hell away
from me.