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If I could choose one tale that raises the hairs on my arms it would be HP Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth.  If you could choose one book or piece of literature as the most scary what would it be?

These are not 'stories' but actual novels, so hope it fits with your question:

I found "Ghost Story" by Peter Straub to be very scary (but long), but the big stand out in my mind was my first attempt at reading "All Quiet on the Western Front" by  Erich Maria Remarque.  That book literally gave me nightmares the first go around, but a few years later, I did read it all the way through.

Let's see . . . . scariest short story is probably either Lovecraft's "The Whisperer in Darkness" or Stephen King's "The Mist."

Scariest novel . . .  hmmm.  "Ghost Story" rocked my world as a teenager, but I think just for sheer sledgehammer scare power "Pet Sematary" is one of the spookiest stories ever, closely followed by "IT".

Thinking on the fly, I'd have to say that Neil Gaiman's Coraline is the scariest book I've read.  I've never quite come to terms with it, either, as it is technically young-adult fiction.  It seems to me all of the terror I felt in reading it was generated entirely by my own imagination; I cannot point to a specific segment and say, "That was scary!" or, "That was not."

I was fortunate to be able to attend a reading by Gaiman when I lived in Berkeley.  Someone had brought up Coraline during the Q&A section and he said much the same.  Children apparently looked at the text from a much more literal standpoint and found it to be merely a thrilling adventure.  Adults, on the other hand, seemed to bring all sorts of horrendous subtext with them while reading it and thus had entirely different experiences.  My disturbed mind evidently warped it into a horrifically straining series of events and I read it in a single sitting.

Story-wise, it is vaguely similar to Mirror Mask.  A little girl named Coraline walks through a door that isn't there and ends up in a land that is not.  The creator is a wicked woman who, without children of her own, tries to steal those from the real world.  Coraline, trapped, must then go through a series of ordeals to escape to the other side.

I still think that the Stephen King novella The Mist is one of the best things that he's ever written.

I don't know what it is about it, but it never fails to get under my skin everytime I read it.

I hope that they don't srew up the movie adaptation.

"The Mist" is a good one.  I think it is the idea that suddenly our world is no longer safe; it becomes an alien place.  Add to that the intrusion of the mist itself, which is a natural environment for the horrors, but a serious handicap for us, and you have an excellent setting.  I've always liked the whole bit about when they went onto the loading dock in the back.  I used to work in a supermarket during my last two years of high school and could picture that scene perfectly.

When I read the title of this thread this story is what immediately came to mind. Most of Lovecraft's stories still have the power to creep me out. Pickman's Model is another favorite. I seem to reread all of his stuff every couple of years. Some of Ambrose Bierce's horror stories rival Lovecraft.

Flannery O'Connor also managed to write some extremely creepy short stories even though they are not what you'd think of as horror. A Good Man is Hard to Find actually gave me nightmares when we read it in a lit class.

F. Paul Wilson's The Barrens and Other Stories is a great collection I picked up recently. Many of his stories remind me of Lovecraft.


I recently read Tananarive Due's The Good House and thought it was extremely frightening novel despite a sort of cheat ending.

Another Lovecraft fan here! His short story,the TOMB is one of my favorites. Novels...Shirley Jackson's the HAUNTING of HILL HOUSE...without a doubt!

  (http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l79/RCMerchant/019.jpg) (http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l79/RCMerchant/019-back.jpg)

I've seen both movie adaptations, but never read the book.  Say, did any of you ever read a novel by Graham Masterton entitled The Pariah ?  I read it 20 years ago and it scared me silly, but I lost my copy and have never seen another.

Another scary novel I remembered is Cold Moon Over Babylon (http://www.amazon.com/Cold-Moon-Babylon-Michael-McDowell/dp/0380486601).  I read it as a kid, and I recall it keeping me awake at night.

Wow, I'd almost forgotten about Michael McDowell! He wrote several really great horror novels in the 80's, including a really creepy six volume series called "Blackwater".  Stephen King was a big fan of his.

He wrote a few screenplays, including BEETLEJUICE. In the late 90's I realized I hadn't seen anything from him in a while and found out he had died of AIDS.  His last, unfinished novel was completed by Tabitha King.

The scariest story I've ever read has to by Lovecraft's "Pickman's Model", that last line is really frightening. As far as longer works I'd have to choose, "The Mist" and "Salem's Lot" by Stephen King, followed by Dean Koontz with "Phantoms" and "Watchers"
Pickman's Model was an episode on Night Gallery, was just okay, but it's a story that would be hard to put on film and get right in the 20 or so minutes allowed.
Salem's Lot as a miniseries with James Mason and David Soul is an example of how well a printed story can be translated to film when the people doing it make an effort to do it right.
Phantoms and Watchers are 2 films that I use as examples of why a novel is so much better than a movie.
As far I know The Mist has never been made into a movie, the optimist in me says it would be a great movie, the pessimist says it will probably be a Sci-Fi channel movie of the week and it will be awful.

Dennis:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0884328/

Thanks, I was not aware of this, it looks promising.

Helter-Skelter would have to be the scariest book I've ever read. Written by the DA the prosecuted Charle Manson, it tells the disturbing tale of the Manson "family"  from prior to the Sharon Tate murders through the prosecution.

The part where Manson and his followers would practice by breaking into houses and rearranging things while the occupants were asleep really creeped me out.

The thing that really disturbed me was witnesses describing Manson's total power over his followers. Then there is the day the DA  looks at his watch in court and it's stopped and he looks at Manson and he's smiling.


It's a creepy read.

They had a series of set visits posted on AICN a little while back and I got to see some production shots from that loading dock sequence that you're referring to.

It looks like they're on the right track from what I've seen of it.

The stories named are all very very good --
I am very much a fan of written horror/terror as a genre.
I love some of the ones that are considered passe or corny these days, like "The Monkey's Paw"(Catch the brilliant 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents' version of this), or "The King In Yellow" . . .
I've devoured Doyle, loved Lovecraft, allied with Algernon Blackwood, and supped with Saki --
HOWEVER, the single best frightening short story I've ever read was published in the short-lived "Twilight Zone Magazine", around 1983 or '85 or so:  "Remembering Melody", by George R.R. Martin, the same guy who wrote "Sandkings", and that great novel about vampires on riverboats, whose title escapes me -- "Fevre Dream"?
"Remembering Melody" takes the classic Ghost Story and tweaks it just enough . . . The best part about it is that you can easily picture yourself as the protagonist, thus the final horror is brought home as something you could see in your own house . . . Hey, it's normal to want to help your friends in trouble, isn't it? . . .  Creeped the living hell out of jaded old me, 22 years ago, and still does, as I can recall passages verbatim.
Very brutal tale -- don't know if it's in any anthologies, but it should be . . .
peter brrr/denny shreik!

I mostly read books that movies are based off of, that being said "Ratman's Notebooks" and "Dance of the Dwarfs" (unlike the films Willard and Jungle Heat) are truly chilling. Both are in diary form and end in a similar way.

I agree with "Pet Sematary". Stephen King is an immensely suspenseful writer and Pet Sematary is one of his best, one of the few books that actually scared me while reading it as opposed to having me read it, then think, then get scared.

"Real books" out of the way the story that immediately comes to my mind is the classic "dog under the bed legend" (I'll leave it at that, don't want to give too many details)

Sadly, I've lost the ability to be spooked by books and haven't had nightmares based on such since reading my beloved Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books when I was a kid. The illustrations scared the living Hell out of me and if I stared at them long enough with limited light available, I could swear they'd start moving and gesturing toward me. Freaky.

If you want to talk about books that have disgusted me the last few years, the restaurant kitchen piece in Trainspotting and the rat sequence in American Psycho did just that. Vile, disturbing thoughts that can't be unthought. :::shudder:::  :buggedout:

The Small Assassin by Ray Bradbury creeped me out.  I didn't think a killer baby story would be scary but it has a certain mood to it.

Fruiting Bodies is a very eerie story by Brian Lumley that deals with a home by a seaside cliff and fungus.  The collection Fruiting Bodies and Other Fungi is worth tracking down.  Another creepy story from the book is The Thin People which is about some people who fold themselves up so to speak.

There's lots of good Lovecraft stuff that's been mentioned.  I think Dagon actually weirded me out for some reason.

Never read the PARIAH,but just got done reading ,by the same author ,BURNT OFFRINGS,the novel on which the movie was based. Started slow...and was pleasently surprised that it had many more twists and turns then the movie did...and the ending was a little more than bizzare! No classic,but a good read! :thumbup:

I've never read a book that has scared me as an adult.

When I was a child I read Goosebumps :Ghost Beach and that creeped me out.

Whoa, I read that SAME book several times as a kid!  The illustrations creeped me out as well!

Another one that I thought was kind of creepy as a kid were books Nightmares: Poems to Trouble Your Sleep and The Headless Horseman Rides Tonight by Jack Prelusky.  Great books of poetry with creepy illustrations.

http://www.amazon.com/Nightmares-Poems-Trouble-Your-Sleep/dp/0688840531/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b (http://www.amazon.com/Nightmares-Poems-Trouble-Your-Sleep/dp/0688840531/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b)

Of some of the more recent things I've read, Stephen King's newest collection is pretty good.  I love FROM A BUICK 8, and LISEY'S STORY is both creepy, haunting, and very, very melancholy all at the same time.

Dean Koontz's PHANTOMS has one of the most incredible openings I've ever read, and maintains the suspense for the first three quarters of the novel, although the ending is somewhat anticlimactic. 

"The Colour Out of Space" gave me nightmares the first time I read it.  The thought of the Blasted Heath slowly expanding, year after year, freaked me out. 

One of the stories in one of the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, about a scarecrow that came to life and eventually killed one of its creators and tanned the man's skin on the roof, terrified me.  Completely and utterly terrified. 

While its not a horror story Michael Crichton's Next had some truly upsetting ideas.  The big one being that a company can own a person's cells and legally kidnap family members to get those cells.

What humans do to each other is far scarirer than any literary demon, monster, or ghost.

I do like Lovecraft stories.  More for the imaginative settings and characters then the horror.

Dan Simmons' "The Terror"

Based upon the Sir John Franklin expedition. 129 men. 2 ships. Sent by the British government in 1845 to the North Pole to find an open water route from Europe to Asia through the Arctic Ocean.

Which man has been looking for, at least, ever since the days of Henry Hudson, and which did not exist. At least, not until the invention of the ice breaker.

The horror is knowing that not a man on the expedition survived. But, to add to the horror of that, there is something out there on the ice, where the ships are trapped. Something that is inhuman, but it has a taste for human flesh, and it is hungry.

The chill and terror go to the bone.

KOKO by Peter Straub

(http://traderjackstreasure.com/images/11899654182411687724021.jpeg)

Years after the end of the Vietnam War, four members of the same platoon meet in Washington, D.C., for the unveiling of the Vietnam War Memorial. These men are supposedly the only survivors of their platoon. They all bonded in the brotherhood of combat. They closed rank throughout the traumatic period when members of their group were accused of committing My Lai-level atrocities in Ia Thuc. They re-forge their ties to look for another platoon member, one they thought was dead. An excellent ghost/mystery story.

HAUNTED by Chuck Palahnuik really freaked me out too, the most disturbing book I've ever read.

(http://www.threemonkeysonline.com/images/articles/haunted_chuck_palahniuk.jpg)

This book is a collection of short stories, written by characters who are on a writer's retreat. They all responded to an ad to "give up three months of your life and create the masterpiece you have always said you would". Each of the 18 respondents had an idea of where they would be going - to a large country estate, a camp in the woods; yet the reality is they get locked into an old ornate theatre house. They have food, shelter, and facilities, yet all doors are locked, all windows bricked over and no way out.

that does sound quite dark, cover looks creepy too.

there's 3 Shaun Hutson books that scared me: Nemesis, Relics, and Erebus. all his books up until Renegades are basically the same, but those 3 were the best. was about 13-14 when I read them, not sure if they'd have the same effect on me now though

'Stepford Wives' is pretty scary as well, from a psychological standpoint, good book also.

I don't know.. this one's a mixed bag for me.  I mean, to me a lot of the short stories are freaky and disturbing but the "wrap" story is just too much parody for me to take seriously.  I can't help but think it would have been better if they had played it straight, but that's just my thought.

"The New Mother" (http://www.geocities.com/orwellus/newmother.htm) by Lucy Lane Clifford from her book Anyhow Stories is without a doubt the creepiest story I've ever read.

I originally read this story in the book More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Here's a YouTube video version of the story:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0XoJ62FJJM

Um, not a very good reading.

However, this story really cuts to the core of childhood fears. And, unlike most children's stories, this story does not stop short of a truly horrific ending. Pretty damn harsh.

It's a tie between The Mist and the manga comic When They Cry.

Not out and out scary, but I thought a few sequences in the novel The Wolfen (waaay better than the movie) were hair-raising in their suspense.  Particularly the sequence where the female lead thinks she hears an injured child.  Great stuff.

Honestly though, I can't think of any book I've read where I was truly scared as an adult.  Guess I'm just too jaded.

GHOST STORY by Peter Straub.  Dated, but brilliant.
PET SEMATARY by Stephen King.  A downright mean book.  The ending is horrific!
THE PARIAH by Graham Masterton.  Been a long time since I read it, but I remember a creepy ambience that just kept intensifying throughout.

Hmm..it's between The hound,The Haunter of the Dark, Rats in the wall, or Shadow over Innsmouth...yeah..I bet you didn't see that coming. :lookingup:
But the scariest book I've ever read is Pet sematary. (I don't remember..is the title mispelled too? Or is it just in the book?)

Same here.  :thumbup:

I have "Fruiting Bodies" in a hardback collection of Weird Tales - one of that mag's late incarnations had published that story and it found it's way into a great anthology.  It's been many years, but I have not forgotten that story or the bones of the "little 'un". 

I really have a preference for short stories and rarely read novels anymore.  Novels that stand out as having had moments of genuine dread: THE STAND, THE SHINING, and especially SALEM'S LOT... all by KING as I know you all know, but I think his other books tend to be overrated.  I do think the first chapter (only) of IT to possibly be his finest bit of writing, and MISERY was damned upsetting, and a fast riveting read.  Not really scary, but haunting, I think THE DEAD ZONE was his best of those I read (and unlike some of you all, I was not so impressed by CHRISTINE, PET SEMATARY, THE TOMMYKNOCKERS... )

In the realm of great: SHIRLEY JACKSON's We Have Always Lived In The Castle was creepier even than her The Haunting of Hill House... Your local library probably has a copy. 

JOHN W. CAMPBELL's "Who Goes There?" was the source material for both film versions known as THE THING and it's well worth a look see.  About 54 pages, it's novella length.  LOVECRAFT's "The Shadow Out of Time" is another great one that I don't think was mentioned. 

I collect story collections, particularly ghost stories, SciFi and Horror.   I have the bad habit of reading stories and then forgetting if I'd read them or not.    :lookingup:  Some stories, however, you never forget.  Two unforgettable stories bracket a great collection for the Ghost Story enthusiast: Victorian Ghost Stories pub. Oxford.  The first, ELIZABETH GASKELL's "The Old Nurse's Story" mid 19th century chiller perfection and ALGERNON BLACKWOOD's marvelously atmospheric rainy night creeper, "The Kit Bag". 

RAY BRADBURY's "Mars is Heaven" is pretty damned scary SCIFI and also LEWIS PADGETT's "Mimsy Were the Borogoves". 

Oh...  One I did find pretty good is The Boogeyman by Stephen King.  Short story, I can't remember which collection though.  Great ending.