April 24th, 2014 / 4:00 pm
 Snippets
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What’s the scariest book you’ve ever read?

Or, what book are you most afraid to read?

38 Comments

  1. April 24th, 2014 / 4:10 pm Quincy Rhoads—

      Poppy Z. Brite’s Exquisite Corpse still makes my skin crawl every time I think about it.

  2. April 24th, 2014 / 5:10 pm Brian McElmurry—

      The Shinning by Stephen King really scared me towards the end when Dick was driving in the blizzard to the hotel, and the houses’ voice popped into his head screaming at him a racial slur, telling him to not come. Just that the hotels’ apparation could jump into Dick’s consciousness as he was driving to help Danny scared me, and I remember going to sleep that night scared that such a powerful entity (though fictional) could jump into someones consciousness like that.

  3. April 24th, 2014 / 5:34 pm mimi—

      hrmm, Gone Girl has pretty good ‘creep factor’

  4. April 24th, 2014 / 5:42 pm davidpeak—

      Probably Delany’s Hogg

  5. April 24th, 2014 / 6:22 pm Chloé Chartrand-Joly—

      Definitely “House of Leaves” by Danielewski. I was obsessed with the story and the sense of claustrophobia and emptiness really haunted me and stayed with me long after I finished reading this amazingly weird novel.

  6. April 24th, 2014 / 7:43 pm Shannon—

      The Room by Hubert Selbu Jr is terrifying. It is one of my favorite books ever.

  7. April 24th, 2014 / 9:25 pm shaun gannon—

      i read a ton of stephen king and similar when i was a kid/teen, and the only things he wrote that scared me – while also being the only writing to scare me, period, besides some parts of HoL – were the parts of Insomnia where shit goes bonkers (mostly due to the weird, as I’d only read stuff like Carrie & Cujo before it) and the story “1408”, after reading it halfway through then trying to go to bed. it wasn’t scary to me anymore after i finished it, which may be one of the reasons i pretty much always read something 100% through on my first sitting if time allows.

      but, god damn, that part of HoL where johnny wigs out in the tattoo parlor.

  8. April 24th, 2014 / 9:36 pm postitbreakup—

      cows

      still can’t finish it

  9. April 24th, 2014 / 10:25 pm Golgonooza—

      Teatro Grotresco by Thomas Ligotti… the hell of the self evoked with unnerving intensity

  10. April 24th, 2014 / 11:28 pm Usedtocould—

      Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School will scare the shit out of me until my last days. This is why everyone should read it.

  11. April 25th, 2014 / 12:13 am bartleby_taco—

      not fear, but:

      the worst i’ve ever felt while reading something is the end of the ‘tralala’ chapter in selby’s ‘last exit to brooklyn’

      i guess it was a kind of fear

  12. April 25th, 2014 / 6:08 am bill—

      1984. Had many bad thoughts for days.

  13. April 25th, 2014 / 6:16 am Timmy Reed—

      Requiem for a Dream by hubert selby jr and The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe both come to mind as books that made my skin tingle with something like fear.

  14. April 25th, 2014 / 6:17 am Timmy Reed—

      Also, The Diary of Anne Frank.

  15. April 25th, 2014 / 10:04 am Daniel Beauregard—

      the bible….

  16. April 25th, 2014 / 10:26 am mimi—

      also
      The Yellow Wallpaper
      Turn of the Screw
      Heart of Darkness
      some Poe short stories

      ‘scary’, i guess – – – good reads for sure
      “scariest” is hard, A D J

  17. April 25th, 2014 / 11:52 am Brian McElmurry—

      I loved The Room by Selby Jr., especially the way it was told. The teenage flashbacks, the frenzied thoughts, the lack of reason for incarceration. Have you read “The Demon” by him? That one gets crazy.

  18. April 25th, 2014 / 1:18 pm Victor Schultz—

      i dunno if it’s the scariest book i’ve ever read, but the scariest reading experience i ever had was while reading a novel called *one*, by conrad williams. he’s a good writer and it was a really good book, but the thing is i started reading it in a cabin in the woods on a night we had a big storm and the power went out.

      so, by kerosene lamplight, i’m reading this postapocalyptic horror thing about a dude traveling on foot by himself down the UK, and everything he sees is dead. meanwhile it’s late as hell, my girl’s asleep, and the storm is over, but for hours the trees keep dripping water on the cabin and branches keep falling outside in ways that sound EXACTLY LIKE SOMEONE COMING TO CHOP OFF YOUR HEAD. and in the book the dude holes up in an abandoned house for the night, and he hasn’t seen a living soul since like the second page of the book, and suddenly he hears a door creak or a footstep or something in the middle of the night and i’m in this cabin in the middle of nowhere w/the sound of slasher killers creeping up from all sides and pretty soon i’m basically like sitting there gnawing my knuckles.

      the sounds from outside were so fucking scary that at one point i actually got a hatchet and pressed myself against a wall near a corner for i don’t even know how long.

  19. April 25th, 2014 / 2:30 pm David Xaralambos Wiggin—

      Adam- you might like “Flicker” by Theodore Roszak. It’s film-criticism horror and pretty damn creepy.

      “Dark Gods” by TED Klein is one of my favorites. He has a gift for writing truly disturbing stories where absolutely nothing happens.

  20. April 25th, 2014 / 7:55 pm steveroggenbuck—

      “american torture” by michael otterman :(

  21. April 25th, 2014 / 10:02 pm Chris_Dankland—

      ‘Frisk’ by Dennis Cooper is the scariest book I’ve ever read, for sure

  22. April 25th, 2014 / 10:51 pm Don't Call Me Here—

      Yeah, “house of leaves” got into my head and gave me messed up dreams for a month.

  23. April 26th, 2014 / 11:53 pm Quincy Rhoads—

      Anybody ever read David Wong’s novels? They’re kind of derpy bro-humor, but they have some legitimate creepiness to them, too

  24. April 27th, 2014 / 1:20 am A D Jameson—

      Haha, truly…

  25. April 27th, 2014 / 1:27 am A D Jameson—

      The scariest book I’ve read is Philip K. Dick’s Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. Jason Taverner’s realization on page 192 (in the Mariner Books edition) is the scariest page I know.

      Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch runs a close second—see the last page, in particular.

  26. April 27th, 2014 / 1:41 am Daniel Bailey—

      i remember It being pretty terrifying in parts, mostly the ones where all the friends were in a house, silently dreading what is about to happen/remembering their past clown terrors. i think the book was long enough (and maybe the key to horror is to make it long) that the suspense kept building and building. it’s probably not a very scary story when told quickly. but when dragged over a thousand pages it becomes a bit more precarious, i think mainly due to the fact that king will overexplore every character to the point that every detail becomes a facet of fear.

  27. April 27th, 2014 / 1:00 pm Human Relations 1932—

      I’m a lifelong fan of horror fiction, but I don’t really go into it for the purpose of being scared. I look for the same things I want from any fiction: good writing, interesting ideas. People such as Thomas Ligotti, Ramsey Campbell, Steve Rasnic Tem, Joe R. Lansdale, Robert Aickman. The list is a long one. I guess I’m pretty jaded by now, and sometimes wish that I could react more viscerally to the stuff I read, but there’s a deeper satisfaction to be had there than mere frights. Actually, when I stop to think about it, the most disturbing things I read these days come from the news.

      One book I remember being a bit freaked out by in my early days as a reader was Peter Straub’s Floating Dragon. As I’ve gone back to re-read it though I’ve found myself appreciating the writing more than anything else (though the ending left a lot to be desired.)

  28. April 27th, 2014 / 1:59 pm Angela Roberts—

      I’m so late to this thread, ug, but I love that scary shit! Bernhardt’s The Lime Works gives me the creeps real hard. I’m so sensitive to those frenzied paranoiac narrators and that really thick language.

      I had to stop reading Eden, Eden, Eden because I wasn’t in the right headspace: all that rape and ragged meat made me too anxious.

      I’m gonna second those comments on DFW’s Oblivion.

      Reading Beckett’s Lost Ones kind of messed me up when I was a kid. :'(

      2 scarrry! I’m also too chicken shit to read Elfriede Jelinek anymore, even though I love her work. I was just at the beginning of Greed and got this SOMETHIng terrible is going to Happen!!! ( >_< )vibe and had to put it down.

  29. April 27th, 2014 / 2:57 pm Bobby Dixon—

      It has been a whole since I read Oblivion, but these comments are recasting a charm over the book.

      Some of his short stories in that first collection are decently creepy as well.

  30. April 27th, 2014 / 6:05 pm Shannon—

      Yes that one is another of my favorites. Both of them just make my skin crawl in the most wonderful way.

  31. April 28th, 2014 / 3:22 pm Donora Ann Hillard—

      House of Leaves, House of Leaves, House of Leaves.

  32. April 29th, 2014 / 2:34 pm shaun gannon—

      i saw It before reading It, and also while young enough, that that trauma overrode any that i could have/would have felt while reading. i remember feeling like “oh man thank god this isn’t as scary as the movie” without questioning why that was the case

  33. May 1st, 2014 / 11:02 am Andrew Sargus Klein—

      Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith. I knew it was going to be a hard book to read, and couldn’t keep the tears away as I read it. It’s not purely scary, but the existential heart-fuck is terrible and unavoidable and necessary.

  34. May 21st, 2014 / 12:33 am UncleIstvan—

      Is it considered to cliche to mention There Is No Year by Blake Butler on htmlgiant? Definitely a book that got under my skin. Another weird one that has always stuck with me is a Stephen King short story called “The Lawnmower Man”. Seemed ridiculous and even comical when I read it, but the imagery has stuck with me and more and more creeps me out.

      Book I’m most afraid to read? Ulysses.

  35. May 21st, 2014 / 12:56 pm A D Jameson—

      “The Lawnmower Man” left its mark on an entire generation.

  36. July 12th, 2014 / 11:21 am Greg B—

      Who is this by?

  37. July 12th, 2014 / 8:33 pm Golgonooza—

      Matthew Stokoe

  38. July 14th, 2014 / 9:13 am deadgod—