What's the last book you read that scared you?

[SilentOutlaw]

Playboy issue featuring Sandra Bernhard.

 

[bubbleboyjones]

 

[Kal-El]

Again not so much scary but books of blood by Clvie Barker was amazing. His imagination twisted up into the horror genre was so compelling. Amazing short stories in those books.

 

[Kal-El]

Cheating since it's nonfiction, but this is taken from Haing Ngors memoir survival in the killing Fields.

'We stopped at a collection of buildings I had never seen before, at a clearing back in the woods . . . Some wrinkled black objects hung from the eaves of the roof but I was too far away to see what they were . . . In the afternoon, the guards brought [in] a new prisoner, a pregnant woman. As they walked past I heard her saying that her husband wasn’t a [former Lon Nol] soldier . . . Later [an] interrogator walked down the row of trees, holding a sharp knife . . . He spoke to the pregnant woman and she answered. [Then] he cut the clothes off her body, slit her stomach and took the baby out. I turned away but there was no escaping the sound of her agony, the screams that slowly subsided into whimpers and after far too long lapsed into the merciful silence of death. The killer walked calmly past me holding the foetus by its neck . . . He tied a string around [it], and hung it from the eaves with the others, which were dried and black and shrunken.

Oh man
Real life is the scariest of all

 

[Two Crows]

Again not so much scary but books of blood by Clvie Barker was amazing. His imagination twisted up into the horror genre was so compelling. Amazing short stories in those books.

Clive Barker wrote a short story collection I read over 25 years ago, and one of those stories still bothers me today.

It's a fairly graphic story of child molestation.

I'm fairly young when I'm reading this, and I keep waiting for something supernatural to happen, but it doesn't. I finish the story, and I'm like; WTF did I just read?

I don't think I ever read Clive again. Something is seriously wrong with that dude.

 

[Zer]

Perhaps not scary exactly, but the most dreadful and effective story for me was called Guts by Chuck Palahniuk (From a book of short stories called Haunted). I remember reading it way back when I was in school and I found it difficult to get through and it made me nauseous. It's good horror writing

 

[dindonker]

Valis

 

[fungi]

My Weddding Album.

 

[blaseblah]

Books don't scare me. But as a kid...

 

[fingercuffs]

Clive Barker wrote a short story collection I read over 25 years ago, and one of those stories still bothers me today.

It's a fairly graphic story of child molestation.

I'm fairly young when I'm reading this, and I keep waiting for something supernatural to happen, but it doesn't. I finish the story, and I'm like; WTF did I just read?

I don't think I ever read Clive again. Something is seriously wrong with that dude.

I used to read every Clive Barker horror novel but was engrossed rather than scared. The Railway Children maybe?
Stephen King was totally outdone by Clive Barker at an improv event, like tapped out and bowed at his imagination.

Does being a child and The Outsiders count?

Clive Barker is the GOAT horror novelist. I didn't finish Imajica but his books are flippin amazing. His imagination is the entire point of why he's brilliant. He's fucked in the head.

I started with Cabal and couldn't put it down. I've read likely a dozen since.

 

[fingercuffs]

Stephen King's "Cell" was really like he got some rookie to write it language wise. I read it and the story was interesting but the literature was terrible.

Pedestrian.

 

[Greta Thunberg]

 

[Trainspotter]

Naked Lunch

 

[ralphc1]

I've never read a horror book before
I had a friend tell me that The Shining by Steven King legitimately scared him as an adult, so I think I'll start there. But what are some other scary books?

I'll never understand how a book or a movie can be scary. It's not real.

 

[Simple Southerner]

I'll never understand how a book or a movie can be scary. It's not real.

 

[Joe_Armstrong]

A book by Steven King shook me a bit as a kid.
About some schizofrenic guy and a lot of black birds

And on another level : 1984 scares me until this day.

 

[Thai Domi]

 

[eighterumg5]

The Amityville horror has its moments

 

[Karl_Hungus]

The Bible, specifically, and other religious texts, generally, because some people actually take that stuff literally. I read and studied most of the major religious texts at university, and they are all just collections of cultural myths, etc.

 

[wendelbudwhite]

A book by Steven King shook me a bit as a kid.
About some schizofrenic guy and a lot of black birds

And on another level : 1984 scares me until this day.

The Dark half?