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Scariest Book you ever read


PantherDave
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Just reading the title of the thread threw me back into the pages of Pet Semetary. That was the first King book I've read. Also the first book I read that caused me to speak out loud to myself. When Gage's father (Mark, I think) was digging Gage up in the cemetary, I said, "Oh manure. Oh manure." I had to put the book down for awhile.

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I agree with Pet Semetary, PD. But another older King book that scared the crap out of me was Salem's Lot. The movie with David Soul did not do it justice. I think there was a remake of the movie but I've never seen it. Nothing like a good scary book to leave on the nightstand before you crash for the evening. King even had another short story about Jerusalem's Lot in the book Night Shift. I don't remember that one too well but do remember one if not THE last line in the story, "somewhere on the side of the road there's a little girl still waiting for her good night kiss." Sends chills up my spine. King had to be a little :D to think up some of the stuff he did.

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William Shatner ... an autobiography :D

 

 

 

Okay seriously ... The Necroscope by Brian Lumley ( it's roughly a 12 book series ... good stuff if you like the vampire genre )

 

 

Maybe that's where the old Rush song called "The Necromancer" came from. Neil Peart, the lyracis, was a bookworm who used alot of what he read in his lyrics. 2112 was from an Ayn Rand book.

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Maybe that's where the old Rush song called "The Necromancer" came from. Neil Peart, the lyracis, was a bookworm who used alot of what he read in his lyrics. 2112 was from an Ayn Rand book.

 

Necroscope was published in the late 80s or so IIRC.

 

Book that wigged me out bigtime was The Amityville Horror - yeah, the story is complete bollocks as far as being "real" but the book is a scary as hell piece of fiction.

 

Let me be another person to give some love to King's short stories. I'm a big Lovecraft guy as well - "The Lurking Fear" was the first Lovecraft I read and it was pretty crazy; other good ones are "The Rats in the Walls" and "The Colour Out of Space", but his best is probably the novella "At the Mountains of Madness" which is sort of a sequel to a Poe story. Harlan Ellison also dabbles in horror from time to time, though he's generally regarded as an sf writer. "Croatoan" from Strange Wine and "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs" (which is probably one of my favorite pieces of writing EVER) from Deathbird Stories are both absolutely chilling. His novel Spider Kiss also works pretty well as horror.

 

King's novel The Shining is his best IMO, though I admittedly haven't read his later stuff. It takes a dump on the movie.

 

And if you like scary stories, pick up Peter Straub's Ghost Story, it's fan-freakin-tastic.

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I have never really found any book actually scary, but for truly amazing and creative horror/fantasy fiction, nothing compares to House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. Very strange and difficult read though. Not to be undertaken lightly.

 

This is a good review.

 

Amazon page. Excerpts from reader reviews I found amusing:

 

Some of you have doubted whether this is horror. If horror to you is simply a loon running around Texas wearing his mom's underwear, then don't bother reading this book - it will do nothing for you. If, on the other hand, it is about taking the norm and making it alien, disturbing, messing with your head until you have to take an aspirin to get through another chapter, then read it.

_______

 

An astute reader can come to gauge a writer through what he produces. And if this is so for "House of Leaves, then Mark Danielewski is a swirling mixture of the mad and the magnificent. This book is unlike any other that I have ever read -- hard and surreal, strange and magnificent......

 

The kind of terror and horror in "House of Leaves" are not the kind you read in hack horror books, where something transforms or a nasty thing leaps out of the shadows and eviscerates screaming extras. It's a creeping, subtle thing, like oil dripping over the surface of a pond. It's like a hallucination, surreal and continually shifting, where the laws of physics don't apply.

 

You have to work at this book, though. I really liked it.

 

Edit to add: Bret Easton Ellis' blurb on it was pretty good:

 

"A great novel, it renders most other fiction meaningless. One can imagine Thomas Pynchon, J.G. Ballard, Stephen King and David Foster Wallace bowing at Danielewski's feet, choking with astonishment, surprise, laughter, awe."

Edited by skins
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Necroscope was published in the late 80s or so IIRC.

 

Book that wigged me out bigtime was The Amityville Horror - yeah, the story is complete bollocks as far as being "real" but the book is a scary as hell piece of fiction.

 

Let me be another person to give some love to King's short stories. I'm a big Lovecraft guy as well - "The Lurking Fear" was the first Lovecraft I read and it was pretty crazy; other good ones are "The Rats in the Walls" and "The Colour Out of Space", but his best is probably the novella "At the Mountains of Madness" which is sort of a sequel to a Poe story. Harlan Ellison also dabbles in horror from time to time, though he's generally regarded as an sf writer. "Croatoan" from Strange Wine and "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs" (which is probably one of my favorite pieces of writing EVER) from Deathbird Stories are both absolutely chilling. His novel Spider Kiss also works pretty well as horror.

 

King's novel The Shining is his best IMO, though I admittedly haven't read his later stuff. It takes a dump on the movie.

 

And if you like scary stories, pick up Peter Straub's Ghost Story, it's fan-freakin-tastic.

 

 

Amityville Horror for me as well.

 

Clive Barker wrote a pretty good one called "The Great and Secret Show" Very disturbing.

 

Stephen Kings "It" scared me too.

 

Now, was Straub's "Ghost Story" the same as the movie that came out in the early 80's, the one with the four old farts called the Chowder Society? Because I thought that movie was really scary, so I might want to check out the book too.

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Clive Barker wrote a pretty good one called "The Great and Secret Show" Very disturbing.

 

I really enjoyed Barker's Books of Blood.

 

Now, was Straub's "Ghost Story" the same as the movie that came out in the early 80's, the one with the four old farts called the Chowder Society? Because I thought that movie was really scary, so I might want to check out the book too.

 

Yes. I've heard the movie is disappointing, so I've never sought it out, but the book is the bee's knees.

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