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Scare Me Please
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
I know there's been a couple of book threads lately, but i was just wondering if anyone could recommend some good horror books? Something to really scare me? thanks
Post edited by JustV on
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If you haven't read Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris, then do it (even if you have seen the films). I'd say don't bother with Hannibal, but some folk do like it. The images in those books will stay with me to the day I die.
Say what you will about Stephen King, but I'm his bitch. His short stories always scare me more than his novels (bar It), and in general you want to look at his earlier work if you want to scare the shit out of yourself. Try and find Everything's Eventual which is a collection of short stories...1408 and The Man in the Black Suit are especially chilling. Eeee! He also wrote a story called Survivor Type (I refer to it as "Ladyfingers" - you'll soon see why) which deeply disturbed me for weeks, you may be interested in looking that out. I think it's in his Skeleton Crew collection, which also has The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands and The Raft - which is silly but scared me when I was younger.
If you're after some instant terror/gratification then you could check out this site.
One caveat: I speak from experience (admittedly as a big scaredy cat) surfing through that site alone at night is NOT a good idea.
Stephen King's IT or The Shinning!
I re-read 1408 in the early hours of this morning and ended up lying pinned to the mattress in fear with eyes like golfballs. Should really stop reading horror late at night...
Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected collection is creepy, not scary as such. There's one in there called Royal Jelly which still gives me the chills. They're adult fiction by the way, but his children's books are almost as bad. The Witches, anyone?
Poe is another obvious one, The Fall of the House of Usher is everything you could want in a horror story - insanity, catalepsy and people being buried alive.