What is the scariest book you've ever read??

[ElektraLOL]

For me it's got to be The Shining. It's way scarier than the book! Especially the bit with the Dog Man 😨

Laska I was at uni in NZ in the early 2000s. It was a Victorian Lit paper, possibly my favourite of my degree.

American Psycho was really gruesome. I find horrible things that humans could feasibly do far scarier than the supernatural.

Ooh the orphan choir I read recently by Sophie Hannah (I think) really worked me up. I was so jumpy. And the end really got to me. Good read if you want to be scared

Gordon's Game. I don't usually get scared by books but that one got me, clicked with so many of my own fears. Had to get it out of the house so it was charity shopped the next day!

Pet semetary - more disturbing than scary. I read it and re read it, them couldn't turn the page at one point.

Grouchy I am struggling to actually think what part of the course we studied Dracula on , It was a Philosophy-based course.. Maybe Magical Realism? I do remember though, like you, reading it late at night and actually being too scared to turn the light off!

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. It made me jump out of my skin.

The Shining and Pet Sematary 😨

I love horror movies and books takes a lot to scare me now but Last Days by Adam Nevill really had me afraid to turn off the light.

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill. There's something about it that gives me the heebee jeebies every time. (Ditto any screen or stage adaptation of it too, I literally have had terrifying nightmares)

American Psycho for me too.
It's the first book I've ever had to put to one side and take a rest from.

Pet Sematary and Salem’s Lot. Still have to hide that in a different room when I go to bed, if I’m rereading. Certain bits of The Shining as well, I basically can’t read the section with the lady in Room 237.

I don't really read scary books, but I'm reading a book of novellas 'Jirel of Joiry' by CL Moore at the moment, and the first one, Black God's Kiss, was reaalllly creepy. The heroine basically goes down to hell and Moore create a very horrible, Lovecraftian scene of this dark landscape full of awful things that can't quite be seen and very disturbing creatures that are presumably damned souls roaming about. When DH was out late the other night I hardly dared read the end of it in bed on my own, it was so nightmarish!

Moore is an interesting woman - not only a woman who was a respected sci fi/fantasy writer and editor in the 1950s, but she was also a dwarf, so she must have had a lot to contend with.

Gerald’s Game is horrible. Aargh that book is so disturbing.

There was a story in my Stories for 8 Year Olds book when I was wee called Such a Sweet Little Girl. To this day it remains one of the scariest things I have ever read. Absolutely not suitable for 8 year olds.

Shrine by James Herbert. Very scary.

Dracula - freaked me out too - creepy to the max

House of Lost Souls by FG Cottam.

And obviously Stephen King books, so many, but Bag of Bones was one of my favourites.

Salem’s Lot, by a country mile. I read loads of Stephen King when I was younger, I think he’s a great writer and writes teens especially well. But I wouldn’t class a lot of his books as horror.

Bit Salem’s Lot is out-and-out horror. I wouldn’t read it if I was on my own in the house and I wouldn’t read it after dark. My flatmate would laugh as I would sometimes get into her bed to read it so I wasn’t even in my room on my own - and then she read it and did the exact same thing.

The yellow wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is another one that stayed with me for a while. It's a short story and you can read it here:
www.nlm.nih.gov/theliteratureofprescription/exhibitionAssets/digitalDocs/The-Yellow-Wall-Paper.pdf

Dean Koontz cold fire. I had to put the book in the freezer as I couldn't sleep with it in the bedroom lol.

The Hot Zone, a non fiction book about viral hemorrhagic fevers, particularly ebola and marburg virus.Really scary stuff. Un-put-down-able

The Entity.

Christine by Stephen King. If you’d told me before I read it that a book about a demonic car would scare me speechless, I would have laughed in your face. But it’s utterly terrifying.

Oh, and there was a short story in a collection of writings by Gerald Durrell called Fillets of Plaice. The last one in the book, absolutely hair raising. About a dead person in a mirror or something.

It must be 20 years since I read it and it’s still making my hair stand on end!

Place marking!