Scary books.

[ilovepixie]

I’m looking for recommendations for the most frightening book you’ve ever read. I mean really really scary. Can be fiction or non fiction.

MR James is a deeply scary writer. I think it’s because he was such an impressive intellect. This was a man who read Greek, Latin, French and Italian ffs and spent his life as an Oxford academic. He wrote his ghost stories as a hobby. Because of that there is a sense of depth. It isn’t just cheap thrills. The horror is deep and carefully thought out.

His world is creepier too. James grew up in the late Victorian period, in which there were far fewer human beings (the world’s population in 1900 was a billion, today it is eight billion). If you visited an empty church, for example, you were unlikely to be disturbed. If you walked down a country lane at night, there’d probably be no one else about. Somehow his world feels more sinister. That sense of slow build, of things just out of your line of sight, etc, is impossible today. Modern Britain is so crowded and noisy that you could never create such an atmosphere and make it plausible. The places James writes about would be covered in hideous new build housing estates, and the quiet country lanes would be filled with traffic. You wouldn’t hear an owl hooting or a door creaking because it would be drowned out by the sound of cars.

anything by Adam Nevill, deeply unsettling, truly scary

Adam Nevill, just any of his stuff. The Ritual and Last Days both really gave me the heebie jeebies. His stuff is all very spooky while still being nice easy reading, and he's very good at getting under your skin.

I won't recommend any extreme horror lit unless you ask for it but there are some that fall under that category that are the sort of "stay with you for years and make you feel a bit ill" scary rather than just chilling or spooky.

Regularly recommended on these threads is Michelle Paver’s Dark Matter. However, the scariest book I’ve ever read was We Need to Talk About Kevin.

You need to come to my house - the owls can be heard above the TV at this time of year 🦉😁

It depends on what you find scary I suppose.

I've not read any out-right gore horror that I've found particularly scary - but I read a lot of Point Horror as a kid and spent my teen years and early 20's reading James Herbert, Dean Koontz and Graham Masterton.

There are five books which I have found disturbing enough, but for different reasons, that I think about them often:

• The Exorcist - for traditional 'scares'

• Handmaid's Tale
• King's Bachman Books quadrilogy, and in particular The Long Walk (has to be the original publication that includes Rage though)
• The Yellow Wallpaper - short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• I am Legend by Richard Matheson

The terrifying bits for me were the elements of helplessness of the protagonists and the fact that there was absolutely nothing they could do to prevent or get out of their situations

With the exception of the Exorcist (and the Omega Man which is supposedly based on I am Legend but in reality bears no resemblance), I read all of them before they got adapted for the screen and none of the adaptations do the books justice!

Naomi's room

Even though it’s not even my favourite Stephen King novel, the book that has haunted me in the middle of the night or when I’m on my own is Pet Semetary. I read it after I’d just had a baby and I think when you’ve had children it’s just so incredibly disturbing.

John Connelly is my favourite ‘modern ghost story writer’ and I do love MR James.

But for truly disturbing Pet Semetary wins hands down

I really like Catriona Ward for a spooky read, start with Rawblood and go from there. Hers are all quite different but unsettling

Nope 🙅‍♀️ I just came back from a country holiday and walked country lane in the dark..silent and safe plus saw an owls outstretched wing 🪽 in the light of my headtorch ! magic. there are still remote and empty places in UK 😄

The Last Days Of Jack Sparks by Jake Arnott is quite scary.
Agree with Catriona Ward’s books. Rawblood is the ‘proper’ ghost story (or is it?…..).
Early Ramsey Campbell is much better than his more recent stuff, particularly the short stories. ‘Again’ and ‘Above The World’ for instance.
Michael Marshall Smith’s collected short stories are the ones I return to again and again. I suppose ‘More Tomorrow’ is more terrifying to those of us around for the earlier days of the internet, but his general themes are universal ones of loss, death and alienation from the world.
John Connolly is the absolute master writing in the field of more traditional horror these days.

Where I end by Sophie White. I’m still haunted by it

Yes, that was good!

A Head Full Of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay.
Fellside by MR Carey.

Another Stephen King one: Salem's Lot - I remember actually wincing at the pages at one point - never known a book to make me feel that way before or since - well, apart from The Shining - that was close, but SL is the winner!

I know this thread is about books but the Salems Lot film from the 80s is still my most scariest film ever!

Phil Rickmans books (series starts at the Wine of Angels) are super scary in a 'its all so normal and familiar and then..' way that really got under my skin in a way outright horror doesn't

Don't look now by Daphne du Maurier was the last book that kept me up all night - I had to watch hours of cricket to recover

Thanks folks. Plenty to be going on with! 😀😀

Dark Matter by Michelle Paver, brilliant book, love it.

Anyone has got any scary books in a modern setting?

I don’t really read (conventional horror) scary books anymore - loved Goosebumps and Pike Horror when young but for some reason just stopped… So that’s where I’m coming from: the last book that actually scared me was ‘Old Country’ by the Query brothers. It’s old folklore and rural Americana, and even though the main character annoyed the heck out of me I kept reading. The concepts of how things in the book happen (trying not to spoil it!) were really interesting, but also something I personally would find absolutely nightmarish.

Massive horror fan!
The two books I’ve read which I found genuinely frightening are The Last days of Jack sparks and The Shining.
Dark Matter I found to be a good book, but was expecting it to be way more scary.