Any good scary books?

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I need some scary book recommendations. A few books that I like to give you an idea os my tasts: The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, The Haunting of Hill House , Salems Lot, It, Dracula.
 
Check out Dean Koontz. Some of his are more serious/scary than others; I think Intensity and Darkfall are two of his more intense books, some of his are more lighthearted as well. TickTock manages to be both at the same time somehow, which is interesting.
 
H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King are good ones, personally I prefer their short story collections to actual novels.
 
I second Lovecraft. You can pickup two omnibuses called Necronomicon and Eldritch Tales published by Gollancz, which contain some of his best stories.

As for others…

Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box and Horns are pretty good dark fantasy/horror. I wouldn’t necessarily say they are scary, but very enjoyable.

Peter Straub’s Ghost Story is up there on the creep factor.

Stories from Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream stuck around in my head for a good while.

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill is pretty good. Daniel Radcliffe will be staring in the move to be released sometime next year.

Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber and The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson are two other good mentions.
 
The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons

OP, if you like The Haunting of Hill House, you will like The House Next Door. The stories are similiar.

Siddons is known for her “settings,” and she does an awesome job of creating an atmosphere of impending doom. The reader is almost afraid to turn the page, knowing that something dreadful will jump out at them and make them scream and hide under the covers.

I was so terrified after reading this book! It still makes me shiver just to think about it! :frighten:

But it’s also “fun” in a scary way–it’s like going to to a grown-up haunted house. Nothing Satanic about it, or nothing that Christians should feel guilty about reading (although there are some “sexy” parts)–it’s just a good, old-fashioned really really REALLY scary psychological horror story.

In fact, when you finish it, you will wonder if anything REALLY happened, or if it was all in their minds? And that’s what makes it scary–could it happen to YOU?! :eek:
 
child_of_God85 said:
I need some scary book recommendations. A few books that I like to give you an idea os my tasts: The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, The Haunting of Hill House , Salems Lot, It, Dracula.
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If you like that kind of fiction I’d recommend Frank Peretti. A few of Peretti’s novels could be considered negative portrayals of the Catholic Church, however, in particular The Visitation. But if you like suspense with a supernatural twist, Peretti’s your guy. Of course, he’s an evangelical so all of his characters are evangelical. If you’re going to read Steven King or Frank Peretti, I’d talk you into Peretti every time.
Some of the titles you could look for are
This Present Darkness
Piercing the Darkness
The Oath
The Visitation(contains anti-Catholic material)
Tilly(a short but excellent pro-life story…Focus on the Family did a dramatization of this story that made me weep like a baby).
Monster(an excellent story to refute evolution).
House is simply an awful book. Avoid it.
 
PrayerShark said:
I second Lovecraft. You can pickup two omnibuses called Necronomicon and Eldritch Tales published by Gollancz, which contain some of his best stories.

As for others…

Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box and Horns are pretty good dark fantasy/horror. I wouldn’t necessarily say they are scary, but very enjoyable.

Peter Straub’s Ghost Story is up there on the creep factor.

Stories from Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream stuck around in my head for a good while.

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill is pretty good. Daniel Radcliffe will be staring in the move to be released sometime next year.

Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber and The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson are two other good mentions.
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All good suggestions, anything by Fritz Leiber is recommended. Our Lady of Darkness is an amazing work, Leiber’s You’re All Alone or Conjure Wife are also great horror works.

I think some of the best modern horror was written by T.E.D. Klein, who unfortunately hasn’t written much but what he did was classic. Check out his collection of 4 novellas, Dark Gods, and his novel The Ceremonies.

Kingsley Amis’s The Green Man is mucho spooky.

Ray Bradbury, whose birthday this is today - Happy Birthday, Ray! - wrote some memorably scary stuff early in his career. Some of the best is collected in his short story collection, The October Country.

F. Paul Wilson’s Adversary Cycle is very good, especially the Repairman Jack novels, which are sort of action-horror. His vampire novel, Midnight Mass, draws heavily on his (lapsed) Catholic background.

Pretty old-school but very good is Algernon Blackwood. His short-story The Willows is seriously scary, even though you are not really sure what’s going on, and NOT the story you want to read before going camping. If you google it you can find it on-line.

William Peter Blatty you’ve already read, but let me recommend some other good, lesser-known Catholic horror writers:

Russell Kirk is well-known as a political essayist in the conservative movement (his The Conservative Mind was the unifying book of the post WWII conservative movement, and he was a frequent writer for Willliam F. Buckley’s The National Review), but he had a second career as a writer of some pretty spooky ghost stories in the tradition of M.R. James (an Anglican cleric whose work I also recommend). Check out his best known novel, * House of Fear,* and Lord of the Hollow Dark.

Robert Hugh Benson, the son of an Archbishop of Canterbury, later became a Catholic priest and Monsignor. Benson wrote both Catholic apologetic works and some pretty scary horror fiction and was wildly popular a hundred years ago. Check out his very spooky The Necromancers (which delves deep into Catholic theology along with the horror, as all his works do and the then-popular practice of spiritualism). His A Mirror of Shallot is a little like *The Canterbury Tales *(or Straub’s Ghost Story, come to think of it), as a group of aging priests sit together after a communal dinner late at night and share stories of the strangest things that happened to them. His 1911 science fiction dystopia novel Lord of the World, which forecasts a future world terminally inhospitable to Catholicism, is also pretty spooky.

The beloved Catholic apologist G.K. Chesteron wrote The Man Who Was Thursday, in 1908, and it manages to be simultaneously sly satire, metaphysical thriller, espionage adventure, religious parable, and horror. (It’s available free as a Kindle book on Amazon, BTW).

August Derleth, lacked H.P. Lovecraft’s fundamental loopiness but is known for preserving Lovecraft’s literary memory through the publishing house Arkham House, which he created. While Lovecraft was a staunch atheist materialist (Christopher Hitchens even includes one of HPL’s letters in his atheism anthology), Derleth was a dedicated Catholic. Some of his horror fiction still holds up pretty well.

Tim Powers is a modern Catholic writer whose work veers from Sci-Fi to Horror to Fantasy and is always enjoyable. The latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie was based on his novel On Stranger Tides. Gene Wolfe’s SF and horror writing is also informed by his Catholicism.

Hope this gives you some reading suggestions.
 
If you haven’t read it already, The Shining by Stephen King is really good. It’s not much like the movie, so seeing the movie doesn’t count. 😃
 
I have read first part of A.S.A.T by Michael Keyth and believe me its really an amazing one. I have ordered the next part also. I am too excited to read it

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I second ‘The Woman in Black’ by Susan Hill. The Woman in Black.

I also recommend her ‘I’m King of the Castle’. It’s not actually scary from horror, it’s is more from suspense - it’s a psychological scary story. I’m the King of the Castle

Also her ‘The Mist in the Mirror’. The Mist in the Mirror

M.R James - ‘Ghost Stories’. M. R. James Ghost Stories

Other authors of Victorian ghost and horror stories. A good collection is this: Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural . I own a book called ‘Tales of Terror and the Supernatural’ which is apparently the same as the book above, but with fewer stories 😦

Edgar Allan Poe is a must - something like this Tales of Mystery and Imagination (which also includes his detective stories).
 
Well, sounds like my favorites have been covered here: Rosemary’s Baby, etc.

If you haven’t, pick up George R.R. Martin’s Fevre Dream. 😉
 
Since Dracula and Lovecraft have been mentioned, I’ll add Edgar Allen Poe’s name to the list.
 
There is also “true crime” books, books about actual criminal cases. I don’t read them myself, but there’s a lot of them.

They’re scary because they’re real. I can’t take Steve King and other writers’s work seriously.
 
Heck yes, Dean Koontz. His Seize the Night series is my favorite, and I also love Velocity
 
My favorites are Kirkman’s graphic novels The Walking Dead, The Rising by Brian Keen, and Zombie University by Trip Ellington
 
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