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Being SCARED by a book

F

Fenster

New Member
I haven't been on the board for a while but I just had to come back and ask this.

Sometime back there was a thread asking when people have honestly been scared by something they read. (Actually maybe it wasn't on this board, but if not well why not start one here?)

I ask because tonight I've been reading Stephen King's short story collection Skeleton Crew and I have to say I'm about out of my wits! :eek:

I've only got through the first five or so stories in the collection but two of them - "The Mist" and the one I just finished, "The Monkey", scared the bejeezus out of me. I'm not complaining - one of the worst things about being a horror fan is becoming desensitized - I'm just saying, "Wow!" Been a long time since I really got creeped out by the printed page.

I have to say I've had an on-and-off relationship with King through the years. 'Salem's Lot is still my all-time favorite book ever, and I also loved The Shining, Carrie and The Dead Zone, but there's been other books of his that I've either found good but not great, mediocre, and even a few (Christine, for one) that I've just plain given up on.

But this one just does it for me. I need to take a break from it for a while though. Maybe not even get back to it until tomorrow. I swear I can almost feel my skin crawling... :eek:
 
Yes.

Stephen King is good in short stories, but shitty in novels and twist endings.

Night Shift is even better than Skeleton Crew. Skeleton Crew has too many fillers. :cool:
 
So, then, is Everything's Eventual a complete conglomeration of crap? Because I picked it up awhile back ad only managed to read a few short stories in there. I found them boring. And the others I just couldn't bring myself to finish. And King was right in wondering why Man in the Black Suit won an award. Seriously?

Someone who has read most of his shorties...what would you say some of his BEST shorties are?
 
Skeleton Crew has too many fillers
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As does Nightmares and Dreamscapes. In fact, that's probably King's weakest short story collection (with Skeleton Crew being his strongest).
 
err... back to the topic question...

When I was a teen I was alone at night reading Anne Rice's "The Witching Hour" and, right at the end of the second book (I think) when things really get scary, lightning strikes across the street and all the lights went out in the house. I almost had a hearth attack!! :D :p
 
SevenWritez said:
Someone who has read most of his shorties...what would you say some of his BEST shorties are?
Click to expand...

All his best stories are in Night Shift; how many times do I have to tell you?

Read "The Last Rung on the Ladder." Probably the only true literature fiction King has ever written.
 
Well I'm plowing my way through this thing. "The Jaunt" was pretty freaky - I got off on telling the sci-fi fans at work what happens in it, and they were all "Wow! What a mindbender!" But yeah, I have to say that so far most of the stories are so-so (and some were just plain "huh?" :confused: ) Especially "The Wedding Gig". What was up with that?

I've already read Night Shift and those stories were pretty good.

I have to say that reading this volume has got me anxious to get back to reading novels.
 
I dunno. Tommyknockers scared me half to death. The stuff with Peter was what did it for me.
 
Okay, a couple things...

First off, I just found out a couple days ago that "The Mist" has been made into a movie that will be out in November. I even got to see the trailer tonight when we went to the new Halloween. Looks good. VERY good. And scary!

Second, this thread has given me nightmares. While reading it recently I was reminded of a scene in 'Salem's Lot that freaked me out - one of the characters reads a newspaper article about an elderly woman who has a heart attack in her home when she happens to glance at her living room window one night and sees one of the pale-faced vampires staring back at her. :eek: I didn't think about it that much, but it planted a seed in my subconcious, and that night I literally screamed in my sleep having a nightmare with a similar scene. Scared the hell out of the Mrs. (Though she's woken me up screaming from bad dreams plenty of times so maybe her time was due.)

Third, I was going to quit reading Skeleton Crew for a while and move on. That's what I did with Night Shift - read a few stories at a time, then moved on to a novel, then came back to something else. But then today I started reading "Uncle Otto's Truck" and got totally hooked.
 
My favorite of King's short stories is "Children of the Corn."

Yet I adore Robert Bloch's stories for scares. I can't wait to start reading the collection I received as a gift.
 
Haunted heartland By Michael Norman & Beth Scott
This book terrified me..cause everything is suppose to be true in it. It 's all short stories from the heartland states of actual hauntings and ghost sightings.
 
LaMonica, have you read the others by Michael Norman and Beth Scott? Haunted America and Historic Haunted America. There were quite a few in there that gave me the willies. There's one in America that rivals the Amityville Horror and I still shudder thinking about it.
 
Lady reader. I had "Haunted America" but I didn't read all of it. I didn't find it as scarey as haunted Heartland". But maybe I'll give it another try.
 
LaMonica said:
This book terrified me..cause everything is suppose to be true in it.
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I got the hell scared out of me by a true story as well - Ann Rule's The Stranger Beside Me, about the crimes of Ted Bundy. There's a part where Rule describes how Bundy snatched one of his victims right outside a sorority house, even though it was a well-lit area and the only cover was a small hedge. Also at the time she was talking to a fraternity member who was in his second-floor bedroom; he was standing at his window talking to this girl, but the door to her house where she disappeared was just far enough away that he couldn't actually see her go into the house. It was like this girl just vanished.

I read that part in bed one night. Big mistake. It took me way longer than it should to fall asleep.
 
Scared by a book

Hi,

I havent really been scared by any book that i have read, even the non-fiction serial killer books. Does that make me weird?! :eek:

Some of my favourite books are Endless Night, Quake, Island by Richard Laymon, All Dark-Hunter / Were-Hunter Series by S. Kenyon, Keri Arthur's
Vampire/Werewolf Series & All of Kelley Armstrong's books. Those i could read over and over again.
I also enjoy VC Andrews earlier books. Her new ones just dont come up to scratch.
A couple of books i did enjoy were: Intensity by Dean Koontz & Cannibals by Guy N. Smith. They werent scary to me, but they might be scary to some people.

I'm trying to find a book that will really scary the pants off of me. (Especially when read at night time). And please dont say Stephen King, dont really like him all that much.
Any ideas?????

Regards
CARY:D
 
I'm new to the forum but figured I had to jump in somewhere :)

I have to admit that some of Stephen King's and Dean Koontz's books have scared me. And as an 12 year old reading The Amityville Horror at midnight scared the crap out of me (I still can't look at flies quite the same way). Jaws (the book) scared me so badly that I didn't go in the water for a whole summer.

But the scaredest (is that a word?) I've even gotten from reading a book has got to be from some of H.P. Lovecraft's stories. There is something about his old-fashioned, vaguely described prose that makes chills crawl down my spine. Sometimes I actually have trouble sleeping after reading his stuff.

Gotta give the man credit if he can still creep readers out after all these years.
 
A while back I was off sick from work and I read a Mary Higgins Clark book. I had to put it down after a while because what with being ill it was playing tricks on my mind!

On Sunday just gone, I was about 60 pages from the end of Salems Lot and I really could not read any more so I had to go to bed. It was the most disturbed night of sleep I ever had! Every time I drifted off to sleep I had a nightmare, and when I was awake all I could think was "dont think about vampires dont think about vampires!"
 
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