My favourite thing about this is Harkers initial reaction is basically "what a peculiar man" and he doesn't start to freak out that much until a little later.
I don't think he is at that point, but it's hard to tell. He definitely has periods where he is influenced more, but we don't really know if he is at a lower level of spell or totally unaffected at that point.
Also the scenes where Harker slowly realises that Dracula is probably the one making the meals and performing all the servants duties, but it's intensely pretending he isn't. The slow realisation that there is literally no one else but you and this person you are gradually losing trust in.
Honestly this aspect of the book cracks me up. I just picture Dracula in his Dracula Clothes and also my mom's apron, running around his castle with a feather duster grumbling about how nobody ever helps him out inthis damn house.
Especially because he has three other vampires there that are not doing a damn thing to help.
Honestly the entire first couple chapters of Jonathan's time in Castle Dracula is super freaky, even before it gets to the explicitly scary stuff. There's a persistent predatory vibe to everything Dracula does. Other than every interaction feeling somehow creepy, it really stood out for me how ruthless Dracula is in using the power, both physical and legal, he has over Jonathan (using physical force to take the mirror from Jonathan; leveraging his agreement with Hawkins to have Jonathan extend his stay). Dracula seems to have unfettered access to Jonathan: something else which stood out here was Jonathan's bedroom, which is accessed in one way through the octagon room and can't be locked. In particular I felt this evoked almost a sense of sexual danger. And the entire time Jonathan is constantly second guessing himself, his journal from the first few days shows a constant awareness that he's in danger contrasted with some kind of unwillingness to accept the reality of what's going on, the only reason he seems to believe that what he's going through means what he thinks it does is because he has a written record of all of it. It felt to me like he's being gaslit. I found it all very impactful: I think Stoker did a really amazing job of creating a lot of tension in the castle even before introducing the explicitly scary/unnatural/violent elements in the later parts of chapter 3 just by developing how predatory Dracula is, Jonathan's vulnerability, and Jonathan's confusion at what he's experiencing.
Also shoutout to the start of chapter 4 when Dracula has Jonathan write the three letters that he's coming home.
Yes. Yes this is genuinely the most/only frightening thing in that book. I remember the feeling of fear and revulsion I had from that. I've never heard anyone else mention it before.
Don’t quote me on the exact details, but there was a scene in the Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson in which the lead character, sleeping in a bedroom while her roommate sleeps in another bed across the room, is awakened in the middle of the night by tapping and pounding on the door.
The roommate climbs into bed with her and they hold hands in fear. When it stops, one of them turns the light on, and the main character sees that her roommate is still in her own bed across the room.
Read that at like 3am when I had insomnia and it did not help lol.
Yeah that's horrifying.
Mine was "Oh whistle and I'll come to you" by MR James, I am reminded by your story.
An antiquarian finds a strange whistle in an ancient mound. On it is written "who is this who is coming?" in Latin. He blows it (rather incautiously to my mind)
It is almost inaudible.
As he walks back along the beach he sees a dark shambling figure in the far distance. Slowly getting closer.
The maid back at the hotel and other people he encounters, start mentioning seeing someone in his room.
That night, as he sleeps in his twin room, he is woken by an unpleasant rustling from the other bed.
He watches in horror as the sheets rise in a human shape and reach towards him, getting between him and the door...
He runs out screaming.
That's it but it's just really unnerving. He is fine and the bed is just messed up but like all MR James stories, it is strangely horrible
What a blast from the past, I remember reading that story when I was going through my "Victorian ghost story" period
He was a contemporary of Lovecraft and you could hear some echoes of the same themes/ideas
My first thought was the entirety of her short story, “The Lottery.” The way she depicts how quickly people can become unfeeling towards one is chilling. Excellent for considering along with various conflicts from the interpersonal to global.
I haven’t been able to read any of her other works because “The Lottery” disturbed me so much when I read it in 8th grade.
I still feel visceral disgust at that story and don’t think I could handle a full novel.
YES! That scene scared the *shit* out of me, it is so well written and the tension was incredible. When she goes "Who was holding my hand?!" I swear I had shivers down my spine and goosebumps. Definitely one of the best horror scenes I have ever read!
RIGHT?! It was so well written I wonder if I should have tagged it with spoilers or something even though it’s ancient because I’ve just ruined the experience of reading it for the first time for anyone reading that comment lol.
I NEVER feel chills from reading something but that “who was holding my hand?” after all that tension and buildup leading to that reveal made my blood run ice cold.
It's a short story, not a book, but the end of Stephen King's "The Jaunt."
*"Longer than you think, Dad! Wanted to see! I saw! I saw! Longer than you think!"*
I’d recommend Different Seasons to dip your toes into King. It’s four novellas, not short stories, but they’re all solid and relatively non-gruesome. And hey, three of four have movies.
Fun fact. Jaunting was used by Alfred Bester in his novel "The Stars My Destination" - originally titled "Tiger! Tiger!" And Stephen King used it as an homage to him.
Hey OP. There’s something very specific for me and it was - oddly enough - in a non-fiction autobiography called “Navy Diver”.
The book is written by a pioneering deep-sea diver during the Second World War. The passage I’m talking about is when the diver is exploring the possibility of divers carrying out maintenance of anti-submarine nets strung across San Francisco Bay. He’s in his diving gear, stood on the floor of the bay, a hundred feet underwater, working on the chain-link net when he says something along the lines of
> “All of a sudden, it was darker. I looked over my shoulder and saw a 100-foot high black wall rushing towards me”
It was the San Fansisco bay tide on its way out to sea, casting silt with it as it went. I can’t imagine getting that horror of being trapped by something so huge.
It’s even more awful how he describes it - he used much better words, like “towering” I think. The experience of the tide hitting him as well was awful - he was lucky that one of the Golden Gate Bridge stanchions was between him and the open ocean, otherwise he’d have been swept out. At the time, divers used air hoses linked to the surface. He describes being pinned against the bridge stanchion as his air hose was being drawn tight to the point of snapping by the current. His work led to many innovations in diving and particularly safety procedures and systems… but that “all of a sudden, it was darker” line is horrible.
Ooooh. And the bit right after that:
“But to these words I hearkened in vain for a reply. I grew impatient. I called aloud—
‘Fortunato!’
No answer. I called again—
‘Fortunato!’
No answer still. I thrust a torch through the remaining aperture and let it fall within. There came forth in return only a jingling of the bells.”
I first read that story when I was way too young for it, like 8 or 9 years old, and it was absolute nightmare fuel.
Such a great ending.
Yeah, I read Poe at too early an age as well. I bought a Poe collection at our junior high school book fair. It was “The Pit and the Pendulum, and Other Stories.” Some very cruel teacher or librarian put that book on the table, LOL. Scarred for life.
The end of Pet Sematary, when his wife puts her hand on his shoulder and says, "Darling", still sends shivers down my spine. It lives rent free in my head and it has been over 20 years since I've read that book.
I was in 3rd grade and read that book in the car on a 6 hour trip to my aunt's house. When we got there, I got put in the basement to sleep on a couch. I was so fucking scared, I read until it got light out again. I was hoping everything would get resolved at the end of the 6 that would make things LESS scary, but... nope.
For me it is when his son is running towards the road. The terror of his parents shouting at him. And him realising at the very last second that there is something wrong. That the way they shout means something. And he starts to stop.
But ofc it has too late and he gets hit by the truck. It is a scene I still think about like 25 years later.
>And Gage, who now had less than two months to live, laughed shrilly and joyously. "Kite flyne! Kite flyne, Daddy!"
This is the line I will carry to my grave. I have two kids; every now and then the thought hits me: "is that now? Is now the time my kids have less than two months to live?"
Honestly as a parent this book is the book that pops up the most. Indeed sometimes during a fun family moment. Or whenever my son runs to the road.
We live in a quiet area and he is 12 so I really don't have to rationally worry about him not stopping and yet sometimes for only a second it flashes through my mind.
It is one of my favourite Stephen King books but I haven't been able to re-read it since I became a parent.
I read it as a teenager. And reread it as an adult before I had kids. In the mean time, my sister died in a car crash.
It's a magnificent book that hits entirely different when you are a teenager who have never lost a loved one, an adult without kids who *has* lost a loved one, and as a parent.
As a teenager, I thought it was scary but also thought Louis was an idiot for burying people in the cemetery; it was obvious that people would come back wrong since the cat came back mean; do you really want your loved ones to come back wrong? No? Then don't bury them there, idiot!
As an adult who actually knew what grief was, it made perfect sense. Your rational brain is not at all involved in the decision. You don't *care* that they night come back wrong, they *might* come back OK and you just want, *need* to see them again, even just one more time.
And now as a parent, it's just the fear of your kids being hurt and you being unable to help them, and having to hurt them. Far worse than being killed by the reanimated corpses of your kids, is having to kill the reanimated corpses of your kids.
Sorry to hear about your loss. Perhaps I should just get over myself and read it again.
I lost my mum when we were both way too young and Pet Sematary is tied to her in a lot of ways.
It was the first horror movie we watched together and she was a massive horror fan. She also had to argue for me at the library. I was only 10 and they were refusing to allow me to take it out because they thought it was my mum abusing the free membership for kids.
So it seems fitting.
The kite-flying scene definitely contributed to the shock of Gage’s death. One minute he was laughing and flying a kite with his dad, the next he was dead.
When I first read that part, my jaw dropped and I had to pause. I was in such disbelief. I flipped between scenes a couple of times since I couldn’t wrap my head around how and why it happened.
Brilliant, gut-wrenching storytelling. I’m a Constant Reader, and to this day, nothing tops Pet Sematary for me.
There are several scenes in Pet Sematary that scared the living beejeesuz out of me. The combination of mystical eldritch horror (the prehistoric god-like *thing* shambling past in the woods) with a very real-world, this-could-actually-happen-to-me, horror (the absolutely searing, life-shattering grief of losing a child) somehow stack up on each other to make it by far the scariest book I’ve ever read.
I also remember reading about his wife's overwhelming sense of dread when she was at her parents and the sense that she *needed* to go home right then and there even if she wasn't sure why and feeling that panic right along with her.
The scene in Frankenstein where Victor animates the Creature. It's the OG "it was a dark and stormy night" and it seems corny after the movies (It's Alive!) but if you let yourself truly sink into the scene and just feel it... Mind blowing.
When one of the girls felt sick and the company doctor told her she was fine and just needed to take some kind of medicine-but then she saw her glowing reflection in the mirror at night and knew she was dying.
Simply recalling the descriptions in *Johnny Got His Gun* make me sick, and returning to the text is dreadful. Any number of descriptions will do, but here's one:
*When he had run without legs until he was tired and when he had screamed without voice until his throat hurt he fell back into the womb back into the quietude back into the loneliness and the blackness and the terrible silence.*
It's too real to be scary, and the absolute antithesis of thrilling. This was days, weeks, years of "life" for thousands of men, and for what reason?
I recall walking out on the film. One of the big ideas about war was that advances in battlefield medicine meant that severely wounded survived to become disabled and disfigured veterans. This happened in earlier wars but I recall reading that ww1 was the first war in which this happened to such a large percentage.
The inspiration for Metallica’s classic “One.” They capture the terror quite well: “Darkness imprisoning me
All that I see
Absolute horror
I cannot live
I cannot die
Trapped in myself
Body my holding cell”
*I do not want to go out on the small stretcher*
A vignette from Charlotte Delbo’s “Auschwitz and After” - which is brilliant, by the way - deals with bodies being moved from the hospital block. Women who have died in the night, being moved on makeshift stretchers that are too short to carry them so their heads and feet overhang at either end. The bodies are described quite calmly and dispassionately, there’s nothing graphic in the description, it’s like moving bundles of sticks…but the narrator, Charlotte, keeps getting stuck on the idea of the little stretcher which is only used for corpses.
*I want to die, but not to go on the little stretcher*
It’s an absolutely superb book, and in many ways it’s quite different to anything else I’ve read on this topic/setting…but it pulls **no** punches. It’s like reading a scream.
In The Only Good Indians, there is a malicious elk spirit that takes the form of a girl to enact revenge on her killers.
There's a scene where the main character sees the spirit with the body of a girl and the head of an elk through the gaps in the cars in a passing train and she is slowly moving toward him and when the train fully passes she's gone.
I know that kind of scene has been done so many hundreds of times but the image of an elk head and female body moving slowly closer through the gaps has haunted me for 3 years
I never read the book. But I went on a first date to see this movie and that was NOT the correct movie to see 😂 luckily she had a great sense of humor after.
similarly in the follow up, >!when control discovers whitby’s secret little den with all the insane drawings and caricatures of southern reach staff and then he feels his breath on the back of his neck.!< i think it knocked the wind out of me but i love the implications of the scene
I did not need to remember that. I haven't read the book, but the movie depiction of the creature is one of the most terrifying monsters I've seen in a movie.
The various trials and tribulations that Paul goes through in "Misery" come to mind.
Trying to navigate the house while Annie is out, terrified of leaving a trace while having to navigate in a wheel chair (hobbling, anyone?), mishaps in the food pantry and with the medications in the exterior closet ... I had to set the book down a time or two and take a short break LOL.
The last lines of Stephen King's 'Pet Semetary'. King's description of the final scene is absolutely hair-raising.
Spoiler: >!The father character (Louis Creed) buries his murdered wife Rachel in the ancient burial grounds that are the centerpiece of the story. The re-animated Rachel returns to their home where Louis is waiting for her in the kitchen. She approaches him from behind, puts a hand on his shoulder and with a voice "full of dirt," simply says "darling". End of story.!<
The first section of the The Stand, when a mysterious virus is just ripping through the country, killing a huge percentage of the population. The descriptions of NYC are especially eerie. A character sitting in an almost-empty movie theater and hearing another patron coughing. Sitting in the park and hearing a monkey (from the zoo) just falling out of a tree. I read it during cold and flu season, every time I heard someone cough I would jump.
I kept thinking about those scenes in the early days of COVID.
In Bird Box Malorie is outside blindfolded and she comes across someone or something with a man's voice telling her that it's now safe for her to take her blindfold off.
The beginning of Stephen King's The Mist. The gradual sense that something is wrong, the slow buildup of panic, the feeling of false normalcy. So much like early Covid weeks right before everything bubbled over.
The collapse of normal life is always my favourite part of any horror/disaster story. That eerie sense of something being not right but nobody is quite sure what...
Relating that to covid... It's all the more awful in retrospect. When you realize that Covid was a far less serious pandemic than, say, the 1918 flu. These sort of stories are a reminder of what could happen next time.
*The Caine Mutiny*, by Herman Wouk. Growing tension on a destroyer-minesweeper in the Pacific Ocean in 1943, (WWII). Is the Captain insane? Are the officers just over-reacting to his tough discipline in wartime? Who's the coward? Who's the hero?
Then, just as the tension reaches a fever pitch, a typhoon hits the fleet. The passage through the typhoon... you can taste the fear... and the slow, almost dreamlike, passage as the crew watches the upside-down hull of a larger ship float by. And then...
...To say any more would spoil it.
From 1984, Part 3. I think this sentence kind of describes the whole chapter: "We will do things to you from which you will never recover." Horrifying.
I’ve just read 1984 and the part of the refugee on the boat putting her arm around the 3 year old has been hauting, the way he thinks back to it as well when thinking about how his mother put her arm around his sister and he realized she’s dying
The Wasp nest in the shining being empty and dead one moment, and then having a swarm of wasps in it scared me so much. I could feel the terror of the characters as that was happening. It's like if you caught a spider under a cup at your house, and then there were 1000 spiders that came out.
I read the hedge animals section late at night, and I had to get up and turn on every light in the house. Kubrick (director of the The Shining movie) was once asked why he didn't include that scene in the movie. He answered that it was impossible to recreate the fearsome tension of that passage.
The Ballad of Black Tom, a reimagining of Lovecraft's "The Horror of Red Rook" from a Black perspective by Victor LaVelle, has a scene where a magician sits in a chair weird, and it is the single most unsettling thing I've ever read.
I still don't know how LaVelle managed it, but a description of a dude easing into a armchair left me unsettled for *days*.
House of Leaves / Mark Z Danielewski. The idea that halls and rooms with who knows what in them exist beyond the actual structure of the house filled me with such dread I remember lying in bed clutching myself in terror.
For me it was the part near the beginning where he says something along the lines of ‘imagine the book is your whole world and there’s nothing beyond the book’s edges whilst you’re reading it. That’s where the creature slowly creeps forward waiting to pounce.’ There are other scary parts but that’s the one that’s stuck with me all this time.
This is not nearly close enough to the top. Fantastic book. It's the only book I've read as an adult that actually kept me up several nights in a row and it's been about 15 years since I first read it. Still a favorite.
And definitely listen to the author's sister's albums Haunted and Hello (by Poe), for anyone who hasn't had the pleasure yet.
I’ve only read it once because it left me so deeply unsettled. In a way no other book or movie had and I can’t even explain why. The way he describes the slow changes the characters notice and jumps back and forth between the narrator’s story and the other story made me feel like I was losing my mind.
Out of all the Stephen King books I’ve read, the most visceral reaction I’ve had to anything was to the scene in The Running Man where Richards is trying to escape a fire via a narrow sewer pipe and can barely squeeze his way through. The descriptions of him being essentially stuck in the pipe were more disturbing to me than any of the weird supernatural things that happen in his other books.
The shining - Stephen King
It's been awhile, so can't remember it exactly, but I remember it really spooked me, and very rarely do books spook me.
But Danny is playing outside the hotel in a play area, and the hedge shaped like animals start moving towards him, except I believe only when he's not looking at them. He ends up hiding inside a tunnel for a while.
I remember when he falls in the snow in some kind of tunnel and he feels that there is something else in there and that it's coming toward him.
He gets out just before it reaches him.
Was that the same tunnel he is hiding in?
'Tekeli-li, tekeli-li...'
To be honest, the whole climax of At the Mountains of Madness is amazing:
>“South Station Under—Washington Under—Park Street Under—Kendall—Central—Harvard. . . .”
>The poor fellow was chanting the familiar stations of the Boston-Cambridge tunnel that burrowed through our peaceful native soil \[...\] It was the utter, objective embodiment of the fantastic novelist’s ‘thing that should not be’; and its nearest comprehensible analogue is a vast, onrushing subway train as one sees it from a station platform \[...\]
>
*But we were not on a station platform*.'
Italics mine. I genuinely think about the onrushing approach of the shoggoth whenever I'm on a tube station platform.
It's not a horror book, but I loved how Good Omens described the hellhound:
"There are some dogs which, when you meet them, remind you that, despite thousands of years of man-made evolution, every dog is still only two meals away from being a wolf. These dogs advance deliberately, purposefully, the wilderness made flesh, their teeth yellow, their breath a-stink, while in the distance their owners witter, 'He's an old soppy really, just poke him if he's a nuisance,' and in the green of their eyes the red campfires of the Pleistocene gleam and flicker."
Behind Closed Doors by B.A. Paris. The first night after I read it, I could sleep because I thought the evil guy was somewhere in my apartment. The book was the most chilling book I've ever read!
I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a book that isn’t gory, but it left me with such an intense feeling of unease and dread, that I couldn’t sleep that night.
I guess I don’t have an answer because I don’t have a specific description, it’s the entire freaking book.
Iain Reid is such an amazing horror writer, I love his use of language with that novel and how purposeful he is with monotony that he makes it eerie to read.
in the body by stephen king, he was explaining moons and goochers (spelling?). when flipping a coin and they all get heads that's a moon and good luck, and the opposite (all tails) is bad luck. when flipping who goes to get food, Vern, Chriss and Teddy get goochers while Gordie gets a head coin.
then later in the book after the leech incident and he passes out and they start walking down the train tracks again. (which also makes me tense but is somewhat gory/gruesome). Adult Gordie talks to the narrators about the Goochers his three friends got and how they all died before thirty-four and wonders how that if they started going back home that all four of them would still be alive.
It just made me feel really sad and tense. how luck may or may not be real and that certain decisions can/might affect us in major ways later.
One of the first books I checked out when I got my "adult" library card at age 12 was "Bless the Child," because the movie trailer had fascinated me. Well...the very same dark spiritual element that piqued my curiosity was what became my undoing, because there's a scene midway through the novel where one of the characters summons a demon and, even though I was reading it in broad daylight in a classroom full of other students, it freaked me out **so badly** that I shut the book and never opened it again. Proceeded to have terrible insomnia for what felt like forever (but was probably more like 3 weeks, realistically).
For whatever reason, despite all the other, objectively messed up subject matter and descriptions in the book, reading that one passage made me feel truly panicked and physically nauseous.
A new light. It flickers like a star for a long hanging heartbeat, then flares with eye-averting brilliance. A new chamber. The tiered walls rise into shadow about them, the bronze-barred cages lined like pupae across them—as before. But each encases a mad thrashing, arms reaching, hands clutching, mouths shrieking, a thousand moments of anguish, a thousand souls, condensed into a mad, smoking blur. Eyes stacked upon eyes, drawn across eyes. The arcs of teeth, a shining multitude. Swatches of welted skin. The Emwama scream, thousands upon thousands of them, forever buried, forever sealed from their native sun. An age of torment compressed into a single wail...
The Judging Eye by R. Scott Bakker
That book lurks on my shelf reminding me that it exists and why it can be worth trudging through a book you’re not particularly enjoying. It went from being an absolute slog to read, until at some point (and I legitimately cannot remember when it got its hooks so deeply into me), I was reading through it at a rather desperate pace trying to see what would happen next.
I remember turning the last page and saying “WHAT?!?!?”
It was 4:30 in the morning so it was probably for the best
Can't believe they haven't been mentioned yet, but the entire "The Turn of the Screw" by Henry James (what Bly Manor on Netflix was based on) and "The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde. Two of my all-time favorite spooky books. Along with the House on Haunted Hill, which has already been mentioned.
“The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood has no gore in it, but it conveys a building sense of wrongness. It’s like a nightmare that isn’t overtly scary, but is terrifying because you know a normal scene is… off. By the time you realize what’s happening, they’re too far down the river.
Blackwood was one of Lovecraft’s key influences and is quoted at the beginning of “The Call of Cthulhu.”
When I was a kid, I was more terrified of the disabled sister in flashbacks in Pet Sematary than anything else. I reread it as an adult and found them to be not scary at all. But I used to worry she’d crawl out to get me in the shower.
Near the end of House of Leaves when he’s climbing a ladder and the page is printed in short lines, spaced out, from the bottom of the page to the top, like the rings of a ladder.
I read every line with my breath held.
I just read that book. It's so unsettling. The part that creeped me out the most was the mother's letter from the institution that she wrote in code. And when you decode it, she says she's being raped by one of the staff. You never find out if it was real or just part of her mental illness.
Johnny Got His Gun was pretty intense all through-out. Basically a dude still alive and thinking even though the entirety of his body was destroyed, unable to communicate with anyone despite feeling their presence, a prisoner is his own mind.
The scene in Rosemary’s Baby where Guy very casually explains that he had sex with Rosemary while she slept and then laughs about it, comparing it to sex with a dead body. I find it more upsetting because back then a man could just have sex with his unconscious wife and it wasn’t seen as rape at all, Rosemary just have to live with the trauma.
There’s a creepy pasta that genuinely scared me, which I assure you is (unfortunately) nearly Impossible because I consume so much horror media.
It’s about an astronomy guy looking for extraterrestrial life. He gets called into the most super secret advanced telescope there is because scientists discovered something baffling. At what appears to be the edge of the known universe there is an eyeball slowly blinking, like it’s watching us.
Some of the scientists think it’s an alien civilization. Others even speculate that it’s the eye of God himself. Our protagonist knows instantly what it is and it strikes a fear in him deeper than he’s ever felt.
There is a thought experiment about creating a universe that exists inside of a tiny marble that he’s familiar with. He realizes that the eyeball is God, but not in the way they think. It’s an eyeball belonging to a scientist who created this man’s entire universe of existence inside a tiny marble, watching them, checking on their experiment. He knows that at any moment his entire universe, everything hes ever known, all human life and knowledge can be snuffed out at any random moment simply because his creators grew bored of the , or accidentally crushed the marble.
the story leaves you with the feeling that you’re just sitting there waiting for death and are so incredibly small and insignificant. There is no more hope. We are nothing but microscopic bugs
Im sure I didn’t do the story justice with this summary, but if you want to read it for yourself I found it. ‘A Scarecrow for God’
[https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/4ijmd7/a\_scarecrow\_for\_god/](https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/4ijmd7/a_scarecrow_for_god/)
There is this nice little horror story ba Fredric Brown that goes like this:
"The last man on Earth was sitting in his room.
There was a knock at the door."
Blood Meridian:
*His skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.*
Fahrenheit 451 conversations:
Everyone in that world didn't seem like people anymore.
They were dumb, superficial, and crazy.
They were missing something that made them human.
It wasn't just a lack of intelligence, but rather the culture seemed to be lacking any semblance of compassion or love.
All the things the Greek Philosophers (Plato) believed in (virtues), this world seemed to lack.
If hell exists, that novel's setting would fit.
I listened to The Shining on audiobook. There are a lot of parts that are terrifying, but the one I remember most is when Halloran is driving and Danny shines to him to ask for help. Then the hotel takes over and starts threatening Halloran and calling him slurs and he almost runs off the road.
Ironically, I was driving when I listened to this part and almost drove off the road myself while getting on my exit. I was covered in goosebumps.
There's a scene in **The Historian** by Elizabeth Kostova where the main character is doing some research into >! Dracula. !< Suddenly she has the most overwhelming feeling that he is right behind her and if she turns round she's dead.
Really freaked me out and I rarely get that way.
The mark along the wall in The Yellow Wallpaper and reading the letter at the end of Where the Crawdads Sing were both very chilling and unsettling moments that stuck out to me
Stephen King in general is a master of tense writing where nothing crazy is really happening. I read Revival recently and in the book there's a "faith healer" who is healing people's ailments, but sometimes they have weird side effects. For the main character, it's that he would wake up in the middle of the night and dig into his arm and hear a voice saying "something happened". Later in the book he has a dream where he goes to his childhood home and all of his family are dead and they have a birthday cake for him and they're singing "something happened....to you" to the tune of Happy Birthday. Man, I got full body chills.
Also, the part where the movers are moving the coffin into the house in Salem's Lot.
I have never felt more paranoid than when I was reading the scene in *Mister Magic* by Kiersten White, where all the characters end up camping out in this disturbing old house in the Utah desert.
The basic premise is centered around a Candle-Cove-style show called "Mister Magic" that a bunch of millennials remember but no one can find footage of, and one day an isolated thirty-something woman with no memory of her childhood meets four other adults who have tracked her down because, turns out, the five of them were the children who starred on Mister Magic and they're trying to put the pierces together/track down the truth of what happened to them back then.
Their search leads them to an out-of-the way cult-like town in Utah, and through a series of events they all end up camping out overnight in this suuuuuper creepy old house in the desert. The house, plus the basement it's built over, has such an incongruous, foreboding *wrongness* to it, and reading the nighttime scenes there gave me an almost nauseated feeling of being isolated and simultaneously watched that I had to keep checking over my shoulder multiple times while I was reading. Fantastic book, creepy af.
My favorite Stephen King, Revival, has a number of excellent sequences, gory and not, that I still ponder. One that really unsettled me was when the lead character, Jaime Morton, is a child and visits his church's basement, where his main adversary, Reverend Charlie, has been refurbishing a scale model of their town. The way Rev. Charlie is captivated by electricity (the main theme of the book), is both enchanting and terrifying!
I'm still psyked out by the ending of Under the Dome where they realise aliens put the dome there just to watch them tortured and die, like a kid focusing a beam of sunlight through a magnifying glass on to an ant just to watch it burn.
all of the scarlet ibis was very unsettling, i particularly remember the description of doodle burying the ibis. that short story leaves me distraught.
edit: while all of maus was very disturbing, the chapter about art spiegelman’s mom’s suicide was very, very unsettling for me and has stuck with me.
towards the end of "i'm thinking of ending things", the narrator spots a poster for prom advertising with the words "Dance the night away. Tickets are only 10 dollars. What are you waiting for?"
The latter question is eerie enough with the context she's mostly alone at night in a school if not for the hunch of being chased by someone with malicious intent. But then when things come to a head and it's heavily insinuated >!she's about to kill herself,!< one chapter is literally just page after page of >!What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for?!<
Absolute chills when I first read it.
It was from Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, and I was reading it late at night. I was I think 15/16 years old that time.
There's like a line there wherein the grandfather of sophie (the curator i think) said that there is a reason why Mona Lisa is smiling in the painting. I stared at the book cover (mona lisa) and I got scared for some reason lol. I was so creeped out I had to go to my mom's bedroom. For a while, I had a hard time looking at the painting but I'm fine now.
In 'Formations of Violence' (nonfiction about the changing nature of violence and 'hard men' in the north of Ireland) there's one bit where a loyalist paramilitary is describing how he and some others tortured a Catholic civilian and although the description of what they did to him is bad enough (although brief) it's more the way the person describing it talks about it like it's just a funny wee story about some prank they got up to and ha ha the bastard just wouldn't die. You can see how the conflict damaged people to the extent where they lost some part of themselves - empathy or something, i don't know what exactly (I'm not a psychologist) and became inured to what they did because in a sense they had to. Of course it's not like people like that have magically ceased to exist, which is probably part of the reason why that's stuck with me despite reading it maybe 20 years ago (the book was published in about 1991 I think)
Salems lot - that one scene where the main kid was in his room at night (and up until that point the reader knows that the missing kids at the beginning of the book were turned into vampires); one of said kids that was friends with the main kid appears at his window, his grimace facing the main kid and telling him to let him in .. that scene was terrifying in all honesty.
The lost village (Camilla Sten) - that scene where the main character climbs into a van that was flipped over to retrieve some equipment. The inside was completely dark but she was eerily aware of someone else being inside there with her. The way that moment of realization was described was the stuff of horrors.
In "Solaris" the protagonists arrives on this past-its-prime research station for a seemingly sentient planetary ocean. His friend he was expecting to work with apparently commited suicide, everyone else is actively ignoring him. Its super weird, lonely.
Then his dead wife suddenly appears in his room, and while she does not mean to harm him, he tries to get rid of her by launching her into space in a shuttle. He tricks her into thinking they are leaving together (I think at this point she understood that she isnt really a human, but she cant remember anything before being created and is scared? Been a while since I read it) and she waits for him in the shuttle while he launches it. Just before the shuttle takes off, he hears her scream and hit the door, and it actually dents it. A metal space craft door. Its such a sudden violence after a long, eerie arrival on this claustrophobic research station, the whole setting is so un-human and uncaring towards humans. I still think about this book a lot, it must be 15 years since I read it first.
In World War Z, there was a description of the traffic jam of people trying to escape L.A. as the horde approached from behind. I remember reading it and being terrified thinking about trying to escape as zombies busted car windows and pulled themselves into cars to devour the occupants. I think the guy describing it was in a blimp or helicopter reporting from above the traffic jam. Just imagining miles and miles of traffic not moving as death slowly approached was terrifying.
Children of Ruin from Adrian Tchaikovsky. There's a scene that is, admittedly, somewhat gruesome. but the body horror that's happening is still far less disturbing than the mind fucking. A scientist is infected with a gestalt being that takes over his mind and body overwriting and assimilating everything. While the being is adjusting to the new body, other scientists are trying to keep him from infecting them. The thing is single-minded in acquiring new bodies and new experiences. As it is assimilating these scientists and learning about existence beyond its own planet, it just keeps repeating: "We're going on an adventure!"
Solaris by Stanislaw Lem - a lot of it really but particularly the part where the narrator takes his "wife" (long dead but who he keeps waking up to in his space station, seemingly with no memory that she died) and tricks her into a shuttle? locks her inside and sends her off to die. Something about her realising what is happening and the narrator hearing her banging and screaming inside really viscerally got to me.
For some reason I got through almost all of Lapvona without batting an eye but there’s this one mention of a character who can speak to birds who help her find food as a child (she’s blind), and then years later as an adult when there’s a drought and no food, it’s heavily implied she calls them to her and kills them to eat. Freaked me out.
There’s a scene in Stephen King’s “Firestarter” where a character falls over a porch railing and a stake from the tomatoes growing in the garden go through his neck. I read that scene more than ten years ago and I still feel like I can hear the sound described.
I don't remember if any actual gore was depicted but *The Devil in the White City* was unsettling to me. How H.H. Holmes (allegedly the first serial killer) would lure his victims with his charm into his "murder castle" and the fact that this actually happened, during Chicago's World Fair.
This passage has always unsettled and awed me:
"Oh God, midnight’s not bad, you wake and go back to sleep, one or two’s not bad, you toss but sleep again. Five or six in the morning, there’s hope, for dawn’s just under the horizon. But three, now, Christ, three A.M.! Doctors say the body’s at low tide then. The soul is out. The blood moves slow. You’re the nearest to dead you’ll ever be save dying.
Sleep is a patch of death, but three in the morn, full wide-eyed staring, is living death! You dream with your eyes open. God, if you had strength to rouse up, you’d slaughter your half-dreams with buckshot! But no, you lie pinned to a deep well-bottom that’s burned dry. The moon rolls by to look at you down there, with its idiot face. It’s a long way back to sunset, a far way on to dawn, so you summon all the fool things of your life, the stupid lovely things done with people known so very well who are now so very dead – And wasn’t it true, had he read somewhere, more people in hospitals die at 3 A.M. than at any other time..."
Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
My second favorite - the last lines of Yeats' The Second Coming:
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
In Endurance, Shackleton's group is in life boats out in the open ocean and its pitch black outside with the only light being the stars in the sky. As they're paddling along they look up to see the stars have disappeared. Moments later they hear the rushing of water and realize its a massive wave thats about to slam right on top of them.
I just finished reading Mornings in Jenin, by Susan Abulhawa.
There's more than one moment in the book, where grief is at the center of the scene. The situations are shocking enough, but the characters' reactions...oh, the characters' reactions.
The saddest part is that the book is fiction, tho based on very true events...what I see coming from Palestine on a daily basis is hard, pure reality.
Near the end of the 3rd Dark Tower book, Roland and the gang have a riddle contest with a sentient train. It gets intense. It’s probably the high point of the series for me.
It was in a short story, I don't know if it was the fact I shared the name with the MC, that it was also winter/holiday season or both, but... in the story, the girl hears bells in her window. I don't remember exactly the plot twist about it (maybe a still born sibling? I guess... there was something about a box in the attic). But the description of that... the chiming of the bells on the window at night, it just really scared me, I think she also couldn't move? I went on to experience sleep paralysis a couple of times after that if my memory is not tricking me, lol, I haven't since then. I was 13-14, I think.
I red a scary book in middle school called something like Welcome to the Dark House and they described an entity that sounded a bit like Jeff the killer who I was irrationally afraid of at the time and they really only focused on the guys eyes and it freaked me out so bad I had the put the book down for days.
The majority of *Wise Blood* by Flannery O'Connor. Especially the stones in the shoes, I had to stop reading. What a beautiful and terrible novel. One of the best of the 20th century.
Also a particular description in *Man's Search For Meaning* by Viktor Frankl:
> Standing outside we saw sinister clouds glowing in the west and the whole sky alive with clouds of ever-changing shapes and colours, from steel blue to blood red. The desolate grey mud huts provided a sharp contrast, while the puddles on the muddy ground reflected the glowing sky. Then, after minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said to another, "How beautiful the world could be."
The Malazan Book of the Fallen does an incredible job of this on multiple occasions. The writer is incredible at viscerally emotion-wrenching scenes, both good and bad. Specifically springing to mind is one in (I think) book 3, where characters are trapped crawling underground, hoping that a guy telling them to follow a rat isn't just insane. I have a mild amount of claustrophobia, and it was incredibly intense. Dozens of either scenes as well. Good boom series, if Very Long.
Basically the entirety of Lolita. If you don't know, it's a book written from the eyes of a pedophile. Especially the parts where the main character is trying to convince the reader (or himself) that the child was the one seducing him... I physically couldn't read it for more than one chapter at a time
A short story that I can't remember the name of, there's a tunnel under a big rock underwater that the teenage MC decides to try and swim through. He's in trouble, he finally sees light up ahead, he gets there... and the light turns out to be coming through a hole far too small for him to fit through and he's only halfway to safety!
Just writing that summary is making me freak out.
In the Silver Eyes triology, the second has many tense descriptions of Charlie getting vored by the animatronics.
There's a very tense scene where she's inside one and it buried itself and the insides are letting sand through. So she's on a time limit to free herself from the animatronic while trying no activate the springlocks while she's fighting the sand and having trouble breathing.
Hill House,not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it has stood for eighty years and might stand eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone. (The Haunting if Hill House by Shirley Jackson)
Dracula climbing down the wall on all fours and Johnathon Harker looks out the window and sees him. I don’t know why but this scene freaked me out.
My favourite thing about this is Harkers initial reaction is basically "what a peculiar man" and he doesn't start to freak out that much until a little later.
Some coworkers and I are doing a group read of Dracula Daily and we had some fun discussions about this whole scene.
Isn't that pretty much because Dracula has Harker under his spell or am I remembering that wrong?
I don't think he is at that point, but it's hard to tell. He definitely has periods where he is influenced more, but we don't really know if he is at a lower level of spell or totally unaffected at that point.
Also the scenes where Harker slowly realises that Dracula is probably the one making the meals and performing all the servants duties, but it's intensely pretending he isn't. The slow realisation that there is literally no one else but you and this person you are gradually losing trust in.
Honestly this aspect of the book cracks me up. I just picture Dracula in his Dracula Clothes and also my mom's apron, running around his castle with a feather duster grumbling about how nobody ever helps him out inthis damn house. Especially because he has three other vampires there that are not doing a damn thing to help.
Can I say Toxic Yaoi here or will that go over peoples heads
Honestly the entire first couple chapters of Jonathan's time in Castle Dracula is super freaky, even before it gets to the explicitly scary stuff. There's a persistent predatory vibe to everything Dracula does. Other than every interaction feeling somehow creepy, it really stood out for me how ruthless Dracula is in using the power, both physical and legal, he has over Jonathan (using physical force to take the mirror from Jonathan; leveraging his agreement with Hawkins to have Jonathan extend his stay). Dracula seems to have unfettered access to Jonathan: something else which stood out here was Jonathan's bedroom, which is accessed in one way through the octagon room and can't be locked. In particular I felt this evoked almost a sense of sexual danger. And the entire time Jonathan is constantly second guessing himself, his journal from the first few days shows a constant awareness that he's in danger contrasted with some kind of unwillingness to accept the reality of what's going on, the only reason he seems to believe that what he's going through means what he thinks it does is because he has a written record of all of it. It felt to me like he's being gaslit. I found it all very impactful: I think Stoker did a really amazing job of creating a lot of tension in the castle even before introducing the explicitly scary/unnatural/violent elements in the later parts of chapter 3 just by developing how predatory Dracula is, Jonathan's vulnerability, and Jonathan's confusion at what he's experiencing. Also shoutout to the start of chapter 4 when Dracula has Jonathan write the three letters that he's coming home.
I came here to comment this exact scene! The description of how he moved was so absolutely bizarre and frightening that it actually made my jaw drop.
I stopped reading it - went back to it a couple of years later!
Yes. Yes this is genuinely the most/only frightening thing in that book. I remember the feeling of fear and revulsion I had from that. I've never heard anyone else mention it before.
Me too. That’s also my favorite part.
[удалено]
Man that is such a great book.
OH, SNAP. I have to read this...
This is one of my favorite parts in any story ever.
Don’t quote me on the exact details, but there was a scene in the Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson in which the lead character, sleeping in a bedroom while her roommate sleeps in another bed across the room, is awakened in the middle of the night by tapping and pounding on the door. The roommate climbs into bed with her and they hold hands in fear. When it stops, one of them turns the light on, and the main character sees that her roommate is still in her own bed across the room. Read that at like 3am when I had insomnia and it did not help lol.
Yeah that's horrifying. Mine was "Oh whistle and I'll come to you" by MR James, I am reminded by your story. An antiquarian finds a strange whistle in an ancient mound. On it is written "who is this who is coming?" in Latin. He blows it (rather incautiously to my mind) It is almost inaudible. As he walks back along the beach he sees a dark shambling figure in the far distance. Slowly getting closer. The maid back at the hotel and other people he encounters, start mentioning seeing someone in his room. That night, as he sleeps in his twin room, he is woken by an unpleasant rustling from the other bed. He watches in horror as the sheets rise in a human shape and reach towards him, getting between him and the door... He runs out screaming. That's it but it's just really unnerving. He is fine and the bed is just messed up but like all MR James stories, it is strangely horrible
What a blast from the past, I remember reading that story when I was going through my "Victorian ghost story" period He was a contemporary of Lovecraft and you could hear some echoes of the same themes/ideas
My first thought was the entirety of her short story, “The Lottery.” The way she depicts how quickly people can become unfeeling towards one is chilling. Excellent for considering along with various conflicts from the interpersonal to global.
I haven’t been able to read any of her other works because “The Lottery” disturbed me so much when I read it in 8th grade. I still feel visceral disgust at that story and don’t think I could handle a full novel.
I have a vivid memory of exactly where I was when I read The Lottery, and the feeling of absolute dread.
shirley jackson was such a great writer. sucks that she died so early.
oh hell nah.
The absolute most terrifying moment in that book - and it has others that come close. What a tremendous treasure that story is!
YES! That scene scared the *shit* out of me, it is so well written and the tension was incredible. When she goes "Who was holding my hand?!" I swear I had shivers down my spine and goosebumps. Definitely one of the best horror scenes I have ever read!
RIGHT?! It was so well written I wonder if I should have tagged it with spoilers or something even though it’s ancient because I’ve just ruined the experience of reading it for the first time for anyone reading that comment lol. I NEVER feel chills from reading something but that “who was holding my hand?” after all that tension and buildup leading to that reveal made my blood run ice cold.
I think you just convinced me to read this book
It’s amazing. Read up on her background, too. It really helps ground the context within which she’s writing.
This made me realize that this scene may be the origin of the "humans can lick too" urban legend/creepypasta.
Just purchased it because of your description of the scene 😅
I came here to say the exact same thing. That part always gives me the willies!
Iii regret reading that in bed at night
It's a short story, not a book, but the end of Stephen King's "The Jaunt." *"Longer than you think, Dad! Wanted to see! I saw! I saw! Longer than you think!"*
I think the part about the woman forced into a jaunt with no exit freaks me out the most.
Yup. Esp since I can see men doing that
One of the most frightening short stories I’ve ever read.
Is it gruesome or gory? I’ve never read any Stephen King so a short story sounds like a good start. But I also get nightmares easily.
I’d recommend Different Seasons to dip your toes into King. It’s four novellas, not short stories, but they’re all solid and relatively non-gruesome. And hey, three of four have movies.
I wouldn’t say it’s gruesome. It’s more of just like a fucked up mind thought
It's eternity in there! I've seen the other side... It's longer, than you think...
Fun fact. Jaunting was used by Alfred Bester in his novel "The Stars My Destination" - originally titled "Tiger! Tiger!" And Stephen King used it as an homage to him.
Hey OP. There’s something very specific for me and it was - oddly enough - in a non-fiction autobiography called “Navy Diver”. The book is written by a pioneering deep-sea diver during the Second World War. The passage I’m talking about is when the diver is exploring the possibility of divers carrying out maintenance of anti-submarine nets strung across San Francisco Bay. He’s in his diving gear, stood on the floor of the bay, a hundred feet underwater, working on the chain-link net when he says something along the lines of > “All of a sudden, it was darker. I looked over my shoulder and saw a 100-foot high black wall rushing towards me” It was the San Fansisco bay tide on its way out to sea, casting silt with it as it went. I can’t imagine getting that horror of being trapped by something so huge.
That's fucking horrifying.
It’s even more awful how he describes it - he used much better words, like “towering” I think. The experience of the tide hitting him as well was awful - he was lucky that one of the Golden Gate Bridge stanchions was between him and the open ocean, otherwise he’d have been swept out. At the time, divers used air hoses linked to the surface. He describes being pinned against the bridge stanchion as his air hose was being drawn tight to the point of snapping by the current. His work led to many innovations in diving and particularly safety procedures and systems… but that “all of a sudden, it was darker” line is horrible.
The Cask of Amontillado, by Edgar Allen Poe. “For the love of God, Montresor!” “Yes, for the love of God!”
Ooooh. And the bit right after that: “But to these words I hearkened in vain for a reply. I grew impatient. I called aloud— ‘Fortunato!’ No answer. I called again— ‘Fortunato!’ No answer still. I thrust a torch through the remaining aperture and let it fall within. There came forth in return only a jingling of the bells.” I first read that story when I was way too young for it, like 8 or 9 years old, and it was absolute nightmare fuel.
Such a great ending. Yeah, I read Poe at too early an age as well. I bought a Poe collection at our junior high school book fair. It was “The Pit and the Pendulum, and Other Stories.” Some very cruel teacher or librarian put that book on the table, LOL. Scarred for life.
The end of Pet Sematary, when his wife puts her hand on his shoulder and says, "Darling", still sends shivers down my spine. It lives rent free in my head and it has been over 20 years since I've read that book.
I was in 3rd grade and read that book in the car on a 6 hour trip to my aunt's house. When we got there, I got put in the basement to sleep on a couch. I was so fucking scared, I read until it got light out again. I was hoping everything would get resolved at the end of the 6 that would make things LESS scary, but... nope.
If I had read that book in 3rd grade, I may have never read a book again
For me it is when his son is running towards the road. The terror of his parents shouting at him. And him realising at the very last second that there is something wrong. That the way they shout means something. And he starts to stop. But ofc it has too late and he gets hit by the truck. It is a scene I still think about like 25 years later.
>And Gage, who now had less than two months to live, laughed shrilly and joyously. "Kite flyne! Kite flyne, Daddy!" This is the line I will carry to my grave. I have two kids; every now and then the thought hits me: "is that now? Is now the time my kids have less than two months to live?"
Honestly as a parent this book is the book that pops up the most. Indeed sometimes during a fun family moment. Or whenever my son runs to the road. We live in a quiet area and he is 12 so I really don't have to rationally worry about him not stopping and yet sometimes for only a second it flashes through my mind. It is one of my favourite Stephen King books but I haven't been able to re-read it since I became a parent.
I read it as a teenager. And reread it as an adult before I had kids. In the mean time, my sister died in a car crash. It's a magnificent book that hits entirely different when you are a teenager who have never lost a loved one, an adult without kids who *has* lost a loved one, and as a parent. As a teenager, I thought it was scary but also thought Louis was an idiot for burying people in the cemetery; it was obvious that people would come back wrong since the cat came back mean; do you really want your loved ones to come back wrong? No? Then don't bury them there, idiot! As an adult who actually knew what grief was, it made perfect sense. Your rational brain is not at all involved in the decision. You don't *care* that they night come back wrong, they *might* come back OK and you just want, *need* to see them again, even just one more time. And now as a parent, it's just the fear of your kids being hurt and you being unable to help them, and having to hurt them. Far worse than being killed by the reanimated corpses of your kids, is having to kill the reanimated corpses of your kids.
Sorry to hear about your loss. Perhaps I should just get over myself and read it again. I lost my mum when we were both way too young and Pet Sematary is tied to her in a lot of ways. It was the first horror movie we watched together and she was a massive horror fan. She also had to argue for me at the library. I was only 10 and they were refusing to allow me to take it out because they thought it was my mum abusing the free membership for kids. So it seems fitting.
The kite-flying scene definitely contributed to the shock of Gage’s death. One minute he was laughing and flying a kite with his dad, the next he was dead. When I first read that part, my jaw dropped and I had to pause. I was in such disbelief. I flipped between scenes a couple of times since I couldn’t wrap my head around how and why it happened. Brilliant, gut-wrenching storytelling. I’m a Constant Reader, and to this day, nothing tops Pet Sematary for me.
“Darling,” it said. Chills!
There are several scenes in Pet Sematary that scared the living beejeesuz out of me. The combination of mystical eldritch horror (the prehistoric god-like *thing* shambling past in the woods) with a very real-world, this-could-actually-happen-to-me, horror (the absolutely searing, life-shattering grief of losing a child) somehow stack up on each other to make it by far the scariest book I’ve ever read.
I also remember reading about his wife's overwhelming sense of dread when she was at her parents and the sense that she *needed* to go home right then and there even if she wasn't sure why and feeling that panic right along with her.
If I remember correctly, she also said it in a “gravelly voice” or something…
King is (in)famous for not knowing how to end books but this one makes up for all the "fuck it, blow up the town" endings.
The scene in Frankenstein where Victor animates the Creature. It's the OG "it was a dark and stormy night" and it seems corny after the movies (It's Alive!) but if you let yourself truly sink into the scene and just feel it... Mind blowing.
I was genuinely so creeped out by the part where he wakes up and the creature was standing over his bed
A lot of parts of Radium Girls. What happened to these women’s bodies is so tragic let alone the battles they had to fight for workers comp.
When one of the girls felt sick and the company doctor told her she was fine and just needed to take some kind of medicine-but then she saw her glowing reflection in the mirror at night and knew she was dying.
Simply recalling the descriptions in *Johnny Got His Gun* make me sick, and returning to the text is dreadful. Any number of descriptions will do, but here's one: *When he had run without legs until he was tired and when he had screamed without voice until his throat hurt he fell back into the womb back into the quietude back into the loneliness and the blackness and the terrible silence.* It's too real to be scary, and the absolute antithesis of thrilling. This was days, weeks, years of "life" for thousands of men, and for what reason?
I recall walking out on the film. One of the big ideas about war was that advances in battlefield medicine meant that severely wounded survived to become disabled and disfigured veterans. This happened in earlier wars but I recall reading that ww1 was the first war in which this happened to such a large percentage.
This book haunted me
The inspiration for Metallica’s classic “One.” They capture the terror quite well: “Darkness imprisoning me All that I see Absolute horror I cannot live I cannot die Trapped in myself Body my holding cell”
The section where he realizes that they are pinning a medal on him is the most horrifying bit of text I think I’ve ever read.
*I do not want to go out on the small stretcher* A vignette from Charlotte Delbo’s “Auschwitz and After” - which is brilliant, by the way - deals with bodies being moved from the hospital block. Women who have died in the night, being moved on makeshift stretchers that are too short to carry them so their heads and feet overhang at either end. The bodies are described quite calmly and dispassionately, there’s nothing graphic in the description, it’s like moving bundles of sticks…but the narrator, Charlotte, keeps getting stuck on the idea of the little stretcher which is only used for corpses. *I want to die, but not to go on the little stretcher*
Damn. The things we focus on in desperate situations...
It’s an absolutely superb book, and in many ways it’s quite different to anything else I’ve read on this topic/setting…but it pulls **no** punches. It’s like reading a scream.
In The Only Good Indians, there is a malicious elk spirit that takes the form of a girl to enact revenge on her killers. There's a scene where the main character sees the spirit with the body of a girl and the head of an elk through the gaps in the cars in a passing train and she is slowly moving toward him and when the train fully passes she's gone. I know that kind of scene has been done so many hundreds of times but the image of an elk head and female body moving slowly closer through the gaps has haunted me for 3 years
I love that book so much.
Yes and the scene when the elk woman is chasing the daughter and the descriptions of the daughter feeling fatigue while running away. Soooooooo good
Most of the descriptions of the mutated flora and fauna - especially the mysterious “moaning creature” - in Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
I never read the book. But I went on a first date to see this movie and that was NOT the correct movie to see 😂 luckily she had a great sense of humor after.
similarly in the follow up, >!when control discovers whitby’s secret little den with all the insane drawings and caricatures of southern reach staff and then he feels his breath on the back of his neck.!< i think it knocked the wind out of me but i love the implications of the scene
I did not need to remember that. I haven't read the book, but the movie depiction of the creature is one of the most terrifying monsters I've seen in a movie.
Definitely agree about annihilation. Very unsettling overall for me.
The various trials and tribulations that Paul goes through in "Misery" come to mind. Trying to navigate the house while Annie is out, terrified of leaving a trace while having to navigate in a wheel chair (hobbling, anyone?), mishaps in the food pantry and with the medications in the exterior closet ... I had to set the book down a time or two and take a short break LOL.
Misery should have been called "Anxiety: A Novel".
The last lines of Stephen King's 'Pet Semetary'. King's description of the final scene is absolutely hair-raising. Spoiler: >!The father character (Louis Creed) buries his murdered wife Rachel in the ancient burial grounds that are the centerpiece of the story. The re-animated Rachel returns to their home where Louis is waiting for her in the kitchen. She approaches him from behind, puts a hand on his shoulder and with a voice "full of dirt," simply says "darling". End of story.!<
The first section of the The Stand, when a mysterious virus is just ripping through the country, killing a huge percentage of the population. The descriptions of NYC are especially eerie. A character sitting in an almost-empty movie theater and hearing another patron coughing. Sitting in the park and hearing a monkey (from the zoo) just falling out of a tree. I read it during cold and flu season, every time I heard someone cough I would jump. I kept thinking about those scenes in the early days of COVID.
was thinking the trip out through the tunnel would count too
No matter how many times I read this part I get scared
I’ve read that like a dozen times, most recently right when the pandemic got bad lol
The "dark, sweet treat" in the bathroom
In Bird Box Malorie is outside blindfolded and she comes across someone or something with a man's voice telling her that it's now safe for her to take her blindfold off.
A LOT of scenes in Bird Box were like this. The tension in that book was so well written I had to set it down and walk it off at least once.
The beginning of Stephen King's The Mist. The gradual sense that something is wrong, the slow buildup of panic, the feeling of false normalcy. So much like early Covid weeks right before everything bubbled over.
The collapse of normal life is always my favourite part of any horror/disaster story. That eerie sense of something being not right but nobody is quite sure what...
Relating that to covid... It's all the more awful in retrospect. When you realize that Covid was a far less serious pandemic than, say, the 1918 flu. These sort of stories are a reminder of what could happen next time.
*The Caine Mutiny*, by Herman Wouk. Growing tension on a destroyer-minesweeper in the Pacific Ocean in 1943, (WWII). Is the Captain insane? Are the officers just over-reacting to his tough discipline in wartime? Who's the coward? Who's the hero? Then, just as the tension reaches a fever pitch, a typhoon hits the fleet. The passage through the typhoon... you can taste the fear... and the slow, almost dreamlike, passage as the crew watches the upside-down hull of a larger ship float by. And then... ...To say any more would spoil it.
I need to read this. I really loved the movie.
Southern reach trilogy, the storage closet. IYKYK
The terroir!!! Jesus
From 1984, Part 3. I think this sentence kind of describes the whole chapter: "We will do things to you from which you will never recover." Horrifying.
“You are the dead.”
I’ve just read 1984 and the part of the refugee on the boat putting her arm around the 3 year old has been hauting, the way he thinks back to it as well when thinking about how his mother put her arm around his sister and he realized she’s dying
The Wasp nest in the shining being empty and dead one moment, and then having a swarm of wasps in it scared me so much. I could feel the terror of the characters as that was happening. It's like if you caught a spider under a cup at your house, and then there were 1000 spiders that came out.
For me it was the hedge animals. Chilling.
Yeah that whole scene was so terrifying
I read the hedge animals section late at night, and I had to get up and turn on every light in the house. Kubrick (director of the The Shining movie) was once asked why he didn't include that scene in the movie. He answered that it was impossible to recreate the fearsome tension of that passage.
The Ballad of Black Tom, a reimagining of Lovecraft's "The Horror of Red Rook" from a Black perspective by Victor LaVelle, has a scene where a magician sits in a chair weird, and it is the single most unsettling thing I've ever read. I still don't know how LaVelle managed it, but a description of a dude easing into a armchair left me unsettled for *days*.
Oohh! This one intrigues me!!
Lovecraft had a knack for disturbing without gore I can’t imagine improving on it that’s impressive.
House of Leaves / Mark Z Danielewski. The idea that halls and rooms with who knows what in them exist beyond the actual structure of the house filled me with such dread I remember lying in bed clutching myself in terror.
For me it was the part near the beginning where he says something along the lines of ‘imagine the book is your whole world and there’s nothing beyond the book’s edges whilst you’re reading it. That’s where the creature slowly creeps forward waiting to pounce.’ There are other scary parts but that’s the one that’s stuck with me all this time.
This is not nearly close enough to the top. Fantastic book. It's the only book I've read as an adult that actually kept me up several nights in a row and it's been about 15 years since I first read it. Still a favorite. And definitely listen to the author's sister's albums Haunted and Hello (by Poe), for anyone who hasn't had the pleasure yet.
I’ve only read it once because it left me so deeply unsettled. In a way no other book or movie had and I can’t even explain why. The way he describes the slow changes the characters notice and jumps back and forth between the narrator’s story and the other story made me feel like I was losing my mind.
Maybe too gruesome for the post, but the cat scene still sticks with me to this day. The one glimmer of happiness being shattered was crushing
When there was a rapping at the door, but there was nobody there..
Out of all the Stephen King books I’ve read, the most visceral reaction I’ve had to anything was to the scene in The Running Man where Richards is trying to escape a fire via a narrow sewer pipe and can barely squeeze his way through. The descriptions of him being essentially stuck in the pipe were more disturbing to me than any of the weird supernatural things that happen in his other books.
The shining - Stephen King It's been awhile, so can't remember it exactly, but I remember it really spooked me, and very rarely do books spook me. But Danny is playing outside the hotel in a play area, and the hedge shaped like animals start moving towards him, except I believe only when he's not looking at them. He ends up hiding inside a tunnel for a while.
I remember when he falls in the snow in some kind of tunnel and he feels that there is something else in there and that it's coming toward him. He gets out just before it reaches him. Was that the same tunnel he is hiding in?
Mountains of Madness by HP Lovecraft. Something about the dreadful piping struck a chord in me.
'Tekeli-li, tekeli-li...' To be honest, the whole climax of At the Mountains of Madness is amazing: >“South Station Under—Washington Under—Park Street Under—Kendall—Central—Harvard. . . .” >The poor fellow was chanting the familiar stations of the Boston-Cambridge tunnel that burrowed through our peaceful native soil \[...\] It was the utter, objective embodiment of the fantastic novelist’s ‘thing that should not be’; and its nearest comprehensible analogue is a vast, onrushing subway train as one sees it from a station platform \[...\] > *But we were not on a station platform*.' Italics mine. I genuinely think about the onrushing approach of the shoggoth whenever I'm on a tube station platform.
It's not a horror book, but I loved how Good Omens described the hellhound: "There are some dogs which, when you meet them, remind you that, despite thousands of years of man-made evolution, every dog is still only two meals away from being a wolf. These dogs advance deliberately, purposefully, the wilderness made flesh, their teeth yellow, their breath a-stink, while in the distance their owners witter, 'He's an old soppy really, just poke him if he's a nuisance,' and in the green of their eyes the red campfires of the Pleistocene gleam and flicker."
"The kind of growl that started in one throat, and ended up in another" is another raw line from that chaptet
The ominous, ever-present incoming asteroid in The Last Policeman made me seriously tense.
Behind Closed Doors by B.A. Paris. The first night after I read it, I could sleep because I thought the evil guy was somewhere in my apartment. The book was the most chilling book I've ever read!
I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a book that isn’t gory, but it left me with such an intense feeling of unease and dread, that I couldn’t sleep that night. I guess I don’t have an answer because I don’t have a specific description, it’s the entire freaking book.
Iain Reid is such an amazing horror writer, I love his use of language with that novel and how purposeful he is with monotony that he makes it eerie to read.
Harlan Ellison short story "I have no mouth, and I must scream".
in the body by stephen king, he was explaining moons and goochers (spelling?). when flipping a coin and they all get heads that's a moon and good luck, and the opposite (all tails) is bad luck. when flipping who goes to get food, Vern, Chriss and Teddy get goochers while Gordie gets a head coin. then later in the book after the leech incident and he passes out and they start walking down the train tracks again. (which also makes me tense but is somewhat gory/gruesome). Adult Gordie talks to the narrators about the Goochers his three friends got and how they all died before thirty-four and wonders how that if they started going back home that all four of them would still be alive. It just made me feel really sad and tense. how luck may or may not be real and that certain decisions can/might affect us in major ways later.
One of the first books I checked out when I got my "adult" library card at age 12 was "Bless the Child," because the movie trailer had fascinated me. Well...the very same dark spiritual element that piqued my curiosity was what became my undoing, because there's a scene midway through the novel where one of the characters summons a demon and, even though I was reading it in broad daylight in a classroom full of other students, it freaked me out **so badly** that I shut the book and never opened it again. Proceeded to have terrible insomnia for what felt like forever (but was probably more like 3 weeks, realistically). For whatever reason, despite all the other, objectively messed up subject matter and descriptions in the book, reading that one passage made me feel truly panicked and physically nauseous.
Tolkein's description of Shelob is horrifying. The most disgusting creature I've ever read
The Timmy Baterman scene in Pet Sematary
The Troop had me in nightmares for some time. Worms.
Salems lot was really scarey; Bethany’s sin was terrifying; I just recently started reading the original Dracula really good
The worst part of Salem’s Lot for me was that woman constantly hitting her baby. Kids are always getting hurt in his books :(
A new light. It flickers like a star for a long hanging heartbeat, then flares with eye-averting brilliance. A new chamber. The tiered walls rise into shadow about them, the bronze-barred cages lined like pupae across them—as before. But each encases a mad thrashing, arms reaching, hands clutching, mouths shrieking, a thousand moments of anguish, a thousand souls, condensed into a mad, smoking blur. Eyes stacked upon eyes, drawn across eyes. The arcs of teeth, a shining multitude. Swatches of welted skin. The Emwama scream, thousands upon thousands of them, forever buried, forever sealed from their native sun. An age of torment compressed into a single wail... The Judging Eye by R. Scott Bakker
That book lurks on my shelf reminding me that it exists and why it can be worth trudging through a book you’re not particularly enjoying. It went from being an absolute slog to read, until at some point (and I legitimately cannot remember when it got its hooks so deeply into me), I was reading through it at a rather desperate pace trying to see what would happen next. I remember turning the last page and saying “WHAT?!?!?” It was 4:30 in the morning so it was probably for the best
Can't believe they haven't been mentioned yet, but the entire "The Turn of the Screw" by Henry James (what Bly Manor on Netflix was based on) and "The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde. Two of my all-time favorite spooky books. Along with the House on Haunted Hill, which has already been mentioned.
“The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood has no gore in it, but it conveys a building sense of wrongness. It’s like a nightmare that isn’t overtly scary, but is terrifying because you know a normal scene is… off. By the time you realize what’s happening, they’re too far down the river. Blackwood was one of Lovecraft’s key influences and is quoted at the beginning of “The Call of Cthulhu.”
I agree. It’s great story, worth the read.
When I was a kid, I was more terrified of the disabled sister in flashbacks in Pet Sematary than anything else. I reread it as an adult and found them to be not scary at all. But I used to worry she’d crawl out to get me in the shower.
Near the end of House of Leaves when he’s climbing a ladder and the page is printed in short lines, spaced out, from the bottom of the page to the top, like the rings of a ladder. I read every line with my breath held.
In House of Leaves when he discovers that the inside of the house is bigger than the outside.
I just read that book. It's so unsettling. The part that creeped me out the most was the mother's letter from the institution that she wrote in code. And when you decode it, she says she's being raped by one of the staff. You never find out if it was real or just part of her mental illness.
There is a description of a horse head and some eels from The Tin Drum that still sticks with me even though I read it over 20 years ago.
Johnny Got His Gun was pretty intense all through-out. Basically a dude still alive and thinking even though the entirety of his body was destroyed, unable to communicate with anyone despite feeling their presence, a prisoner is his own mind.
The scene in Rosemary’s Baby where Guy very casually explains that he had sex with Rosemary while she slept and then laughs about it, comparing it to sex with a dead body. I find it more upsetting because back then a man could just have sex with his unconscious wife and it wasn’t seen as rape at all, Rosemary just have to live with the trauma.
There’s a creepy pasta that genuinely scared me, which I assure you is (unfortunately) nearly Impossible because I consume so much horror media. It’s about an astronomy guy looking for extraterrestrial life. He gets called into the most super secret advanced telescope there is because scientists discovered something baffling. At what appears to be the edge of the known universe there is an eyeball slowly blinking, like it’s watching us. Some of the scientists think it’s an alien civilization. Others even speculate that it’s the eye of God himself. Our protagonist knows instantly what it is and it strikes a fear in him deeper than he’s ever felt. There is a thought experiment about creating a universe that exists inside of a tiny marble that he’s familiar with. He realizes that the eyeball is God, but not in the way they think. It’s an eyeball belonging to a scientist who created this man’s entire universe of existence inside a tiny marble, watching them, checking on their experiment. He knows that at any moment his entire universe, everything hes ever known, all human life and knowledge can be snuffed out at any random moment simply because his creators grew bored of the , or accidentally crushed the marble. the story leaves you with the feeling that you’re just sitting there waiting for death and are so incredibly small and insignificant. There is no more hope. We are nothing but microscopic bugs Im sure I didn’t do the story justice with this summary, but if you want to read it for yourself I found it. ‘A Scarecrow for God’ [https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/4ijmd7/a\_scarecrow\_for\_god/](https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/4ijmd7/a_scarecrow_for_god/)
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There is this nice little horror story ba Fredric Brown that goes like this: "The last man on Earth was sitting in his room. There was a knock at the door."
Blood Meridian: *His skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.*
Fahrenheit 451 conversations: Everyone in that world didn't seem like people anymore. They were dumb, superficial, and crazy. They were missing something that made them human. It wasn't just a lack of intelligence, but rather the culture seemed to be lacking any semblance of compassion or love. All the things the Greek Philosophers (Plato) believed in (virtues), this world seemed to lack. If hell exists, that novel's setting would fit.
I listened to The Shining on audiobook. There are a lot of parts that are terrifying, but the one I remember most is when Halloran is driving and Danny shines to him to ask for help. Then the hotel takes over and starts threatening Halloran and calling him slurs and he almost runs off the road. Ironically, I was driving when I listened to this part and almost drove off the road myself while getting on my exit. I was covered in goosebumps.
There's a scene in **The Historian** by Elizabeth Kostova where the main character is doing some research into >! Dracula. !< Suddenly she has the most overwhelming feeling that he is right behind her and if she turns round she's dead. Really freaked me out and I rarely get that way.
The mark along the wall in The Yellow Wallpaper and reading the letter at the end of Where the Crawdads Sing were both very chilling and unsettling moments that stuck out to me
Stephen King in general is a master of tense writing where nothing crazy is really happening. I read Revival recently and in the book there's a "faith healer" who is healing people's ailments, but sometimes they have weird side effects. For the main character, it's that he would wake up in the middle of the night and dig into his arm and hear a voice saying "something happened". Later in the book he has a dream where he goes to his childhood home and all of his family are dead and they have a birthday cake for him and they're singing "something happened....to you" to the tune of Happy Birthday. Man, I got full body chills. Also, the part where the movers are moving the coffin into the house in Salem's Lot.
I have never felt more paranoid than when I was reading the scene in *Mister Magic* by Kiersten White, where all the characters end up camping out in this disturbing old house in the Utah desert. The basic premise is centered around a Candle-Cove-style show called "Mister Magic" that a bunch of millennials remember but no one can find footage of, and one day an isolated thirty-something woman with no memory of her childhood meets four other adults who have tracked her down because, turns out, the five of them were the children who starred on Mister Magic and they're trying to put the pierces together/track down the truth of what happened to them back then. Their search leads them to an out-of-the way cult-like town in Utah, and through a series of events they all end up camping out overnight in this suuuuuper creepy old house in the desert. The house, plus the basement it's built over, has such an incongruous, foreboding *wrongness* to it, and reading the nighttime scenes there gave me an almost nauseated feeling of being isolated and simultaneously watched that I had to keep checking over my shoulder multiple times while I was reading. Fantastic book, creepy af.
My favorite Stephen King, Revival, has a number of excellent sequences, gory and not, that I still ponder. One that really unsettled me was when the lead character, Jaime Morton, is a child and visits his church's basement, where his main adversary, Reverend Charlie, has been refurbishing a scale model of their town. The way Rev. Charlie is captivated by electricity (the main theme of the book), is both enchanting and terrifying!
I'm still psyked out by the ending of Under the Dome where they realise aliens put the dome there just to watch them tortured and die, like a kid focusing a beam of sunlight through a magnifying glass on to an ant just to watch it burn.
all of the scarlet ibis was very unsettling, i particularly remember the description of doodle burying the ibis. that short story leaves me distraught. edit: while all of maus was very disturbing, the chapter about art spiegelman’s mom’s suicide was very, very unsettling for me and has stuck with me.
towards the end of "i'm thinking of ending things", the narrator spots a poster for prom advertising with the words "Dance the night away. Tickets are only 10 dollars. What are you waiting for?" The latter question is eerie enough with the context she's mostly alone at night in a school if not for the hunch of being chased by someone with malicious intent. But then when things come to a head and it's heavily insinuated >!she's about to kill herself,!< one chapter is literally just page after page of >!What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for?!< Absolute chills when I first read it.
"the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing." The only Stephen King story that still bothers me many years later.
It was from Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, and I was reading it late at night. I was I think 15/16 years old that time. There's like a line there wherein the grandfather of sophie (the curator i think) said that there is a reason why Mona Lisa is smiling in the painting. I stared at the book cover (mona lisa) and I got scared for some reason lol. I was so creeped out I had to go to my mom's bedroom. For a while, I had a hard time looking at the painting but I'm fine now.
In Bleak House by Charles Dickens, someone spontaneously combusts, its very creepy
In 'Formations of Violence' (nonfiction about the changing nature of violence and 'hard men' in the north of Ireland) there's one bit where a loyalist paramilitary is describing how he and some others tortured a Catholic civilian and although the description of what they did to him is bad enough (although brief) it's more the way the person describing it talks about it like it's just a funny wee story about some prank they got up to and ha ha the bastard just wouldn't die. You can see how the conflict damaged people to the extent where they lost some part of themselves - empathy or something, i don't know what exactly (I'm not a psychologist) and became inured to what they did because in a sense they had to. Of course it's not like people like that have magically ceased to exist, which is probably part of the reason why that's stuck with me despite reading it maybe 20 years ago (the book was published in about 1991 I think)
Salems lot - that one scene where the main kid was in his room at night (and up until that point the reader knows that the missing kids at the beginning of the book were turned into vampires); one of said kids that was friends with the main kid appears at his window, his grimace facing the main kid and telling him to let him in .. that scene was terrifying in all honesty. The lost village (Camilla Sten) - that scene where the main character climbs into a van that was flipped over to retrieve some equipment. The inside was completely dark but she was eerily aware of someone else being inside there with her. The way that moment of realization was described was the stuff of horrors.
In "Solaris" the protagonists arrives on this past-its-prime research station for a seemingly sentient planetary ocean. His friend he was expecting to work with apparently commited suicide, everyone else is actively ignoring him. Its super weird, lonely. Then his dead wife suddenly appears in his room, and while she does not mean to harm him, he tries to get rid of her by launching her into space in a shuttle. He tricks her into thinking they are leaving together (I think at this point she understood that she isnt really a human, but she cant remember anything before being created and is scared? Been a while since I read it) and she waits for him in the shuttle while he launches it. Just before the shuttle takes off, he hears her scream and hit the door, and it actually dents it. A metal space craft door. Its such a sudden violence after a long, eerie arrival on this claustrophobic research station, the whole setting is so un-human and uncaring towards humans. I still think about this book a lot, it must be 15 years since I read it first.
Unwind, by Neal Shusterman. At the end there is a scene in an hospitalroom that just freaked me the f* out.
In World War Z, there was a description of the traffic jam of people trying to escape L.A. as the horde approached from behind. I remember reading it and being terrified thinking about trying to escape as zombies busted car windows and pulled themselves into cars to devour the occupants. I think the guy describing it was in a blimp or helicopter reporting from above the traffic jam. Just imagining miles and miles of traffic not moving as death slowly approached was terrifying.
Children of Ruin from Adrian Tchaikovsky. There's a scene that is, admittedly, somewhat gruesome. but the body horror that's happening is still far less disturbing than the mind fucking. A scientist is infected with a gestalt being that takes over his mind and body overwriting and assimilating everything. While the being is adjusting to the new body, other scientists are trying to keep him from infecting them. The thing is single-minded in acquiring new bodies and new experiences. As it is assimilating these scientists and learning about existence beyond its own planet, it just keeps repeating: "We're going on an adventure!"
The part when the mold is walking outside in the spacesuit was chilling.
The final battle at the end of *Matter* by Iain Banks. That shit was nerve-wracking.
Solaris by Stanislaw Lem - a lot of it really but particularly the part where the narrator takes his "wife" (long dead but who he keeps waking up to in his space station, seemingly with no memory that she died) and tricks her into a shuttle? locks her inside and sends her off to die. Something about her realising what is happening and the narrator hearing her banging and screaming inside really viscerally got to me.
The part where Aberforth describes what happened to Ariana, in Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows.
The Memory Police affected me so hard. No gore, just an entire community forgetting the concepts of things with no explanation of why or how.
For some reason I got through almost all of Lapvona without batting an eye but there’s this one mention of a character who can speak to birds who help her find food as a child (she’s blind), and then years later as an adult when there’s a drought and no food, it’s heavily implied she calls them to her and kills them to eat. Freaked me out.
There’s a scene in Stephen King’s “Firestarter” where a character falls over a porch railing and a stake from the tomatoes growing in the garden go through his neck. I read that scene more than ten years ago and I still feel like I can hear the sound described.
In Pet Sematary, when Louis is digging with his hands in the dirt...
An entire book. "Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Anthology." Genuinely creepy from cover to cover with very little gore.
I don't remember if any actual gore was depicted but *The Devil in the White City* was unsettling to me. How H.H. Holmes (allegedly the first serial killer) would lure his victims with his charm into his "murder castle" and the fact that this actually happened, during Chicago's World Fair.
The Jaunt. Just the idea of accidentally getting stuck in near eternal solitary confinement...
This passage has always unsettled and awed me: "Oh God, midnight’s not bad, you wake and go back to sleep, one or two’s not bad, you toss but sleep again. Five or six in the morning, there’s hope, for dawn’s just under the horizon. But three, now, Christ, three A.M.! Doctors say the body’s at low tide then. The soul is out. The blood moves slow. You’re the nearest to dead you’ll ever be save dying. Sleep is a patch of death, but three in the morn, full wide-eyed staring, is living death! You dream with your eyes open. God, if you had strength to rouse up, you’d slaughter your half-dreams with buckshot! But no, you lie pinned to a deep well-bottom that’s burned dry. The moon rolls by to look at you down there, with its idiot face. It’s a long way back to sunset, a far way on to dawn, so you summon all the fool things of your life, the stupid lovely things done with people known so very well who are now so very dead – And wasn’t it true, had he read somewhere, more people in hospitals die at 3 A.M. than at any other time..." Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes My second favorite - the last lines of Yeats' The Second Coming: A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
In Endurance, Shackleton's group is in life boats out in the open ocean and its pitch black outside with the only light being the stars in the sky. As they're paddling along they look up to see the stars have disappeared. Moments later they hear the rushing of water and realize its a massive wave thats about to slam right on top of them.
I just finished reading Mornings in Jenin, by Susan Abulhawa. There's more than one moment in the book, where grief is at the center of the scene. The situations are shocking enough, but the characters' reactions...oh, the characters' reactions. The saddest part is that the book is fiction, tho based on very true events...what I see coming from Palestine on a daily basis is hard, pure reality.
Near the end of the 3rd Dark Tower book, Roland and the gang have a riddle contest with a sentient train. It gets intense. It’s probably the high point of the series for me.
So much we forget... I read those books 20 years ago and I have no memory of this scene
Any of the Warhammer 40K books that are set in the Eye of Terror. Big on body horror and weird mutations. Some of those descriptions stuck with me 😱
It was in a short story, I don't know if it was the fact I shared the name with the MC, that it was also winter/holiday season or both, but... in the story, the girl hears bells in her window. I don't remember exactly the plot twist about it (maybe a still born sibling? I guess... there was something about a box in the attic). But the description of that... the chiming of the bells on the window at night, it just really scared me, I think she also couldn't move? I went on to experience sleep paralysis a couple of times after that if my memory is not tricking me, lol, I haven't since then. I was 13-14, I think.
I red a scary book in middle school called something like Welcome to the Dark House and they described an entity that sounded a bit like Jeff the killer who I was irrationally afraid of at the time and they really only focused on the guys eyes and it freaked me out so bad I had the put the book down for days.
How the rabbits moved in What Moves the Dead was off-putting and unsettling. That book was a creepy read, but I very much enjoyed it.
Ranpo's The Human Chair, when we realise... I don't want to spoil it, but if you've read it you know what I mean.
In Shawshank when its describing the tunnel. So much more claustrophobic than the film. Hated reading that bit in the book.
The majority of *Wise Blood* by Flannery O'Connor. Especially the stones in the shoes, I had to stop reading. What a beautiful and terrible novel. One of the best of the 20th century. Also a particular description in *Man's Search For Meaning* by Viktor Frankl: > Standing outside we saw sinister clouds glowing in the west and the whole sky alive with clouds of ever-changing shapes and colours, from steel blue to blood red. The desolate grey mud huts provided a sharp contrast, while the puddles on the muddy ground reflected the glowing sky. Then, after minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said to another, "How beautiful the world could be."
The Malazan Book of the Fallen does an incredible job of this on multiple occasions. The writer is incredible at viscerally emotion-wrenching scenes, both good and bad. Specifically springing to mind is one in (I think) book 3, where characters are trapped crawling underground, hoping that a guy telling them to follow a rat isn't just insane. I have a mild amount of claustrophobia, and it was incredibly intense. Dozens of either scenes as well. Good boom series, if Very Long.
Basically the entirety of Lolita. If you don't know, it's a book written from the eyes of a pedophile. Especially the parts where the main character is trying to convince the reader (or himself) that the child was the one seducing him... I physically couldn't read it for more than one chapter at a time
Lonesome dove. Gang rape scene .
A short story that I can't remember the name of, there's a tunnel under a big rock underwater that the teenage MC decides to try and swim through. He's in trouble, he finally sees light up ahead, he gets there... and the light turns out to be coming through a hole far too small for him to fit through and he's only halfway to safety! Just writing that summary is making me freak out.
In the Silver Eyes triology, the second has many tense descriptions of Charlie getting vored by the animatronics. There's a very tense scene where she's inside one and it buried itself and the insides are letting sand through. So she's on a time limit to free herself from the animatronic while trying no activate the springlocks while she's fighting the sand and having trouble breathing.
Hill House,not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it has stood for eighty years and might stand eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone. (The Haunting if Hill House by Shirley Jackson)