The scariest book you ever read

I literally almost fainted after reading that. Fucking awful.

If it helps, people are free to substitute "scary" for unsettling, eerie, disturbing, etc, whatever triggers your particular reflex of unease. It doesn't have to be terrifying monsters stalking you, basically, it could be other things.

Though I did read IT again a few years ago, and there's some fucking terrifying shit in that. I think we're so used to the film adaptations that we forget about little kids getting their eyeballs popped, or their minds destroyed by eldritch horrors. If that doesn't at all scare you, I don't really know what to say!

Head Full of Ghosts was an excellent book. I read the one Tremblay wrote afterwards but couldn't tell you much about it other than it was nowhere near as good.

Unblemished by Conrad Williams isn't particularly scary but it is a brilliant horror, and goes properly mental at points.

When I was about nine or ten I read a book called "The Devil's Doorbell" which, it turns out, is written by Anthony Horowitz. That freaked me out, although it's been thirty years so maybe it's lost some of its sting.

A couple of years after that I started reading King, and whilst I don't remember finding any of his novels particularly "scary" (creepy or disturbing, maybe), some of his short stories gave me the heeby-jeebies. The Moving Finger, for instance, or The End of the Whole Mess, both of which are in Nightmares & Dreamscapes I think.

There's also a famous Roald Dahl short called Man from the South, which was adapted into part of Four Rooms, and that freaked me out as a kid. And there's a really, really creepy Patricia Highsmith short called The Snail-Watcher that's just horrible.

There is a short story by King about a guy who finds a camera that only ever makes a picture of the same street. Until he notices that the dog in the street is slowly turning around in every new photo he makes.

Sun Dog, right?

His short stories are great. They just get in with one great idea, then finish long before overstaying their welcome. The Jaunt and The Raft come to mind as well.

Yeah I love his short stories. Some are pretty dumb, but i'd say one out of four is absolutely brilliant.

Definitely. I can be scared by a book or a short story a lot easier than a film, as in a real kind of shaking/alarmed kind of exciting fear rather than just made to jump. Easier than real life too, because IRL situations I have one of those fear reactions where I'm not that scared at the time (heart rate goes up, adrenaline flows, etc. but don't feel that fear vibe at all, just get super-practical), just like, thirty minutes after it's all over I am.

I think the first story that really scared me, like, actual identifiable story was in one of Gerald Durrell's books - The Picnic and Suchlike Pandemonium, it was my first encounter with "found footage"-type horror, because Durrell claimed he'd found this story, not written it, and it was extremely creepy, and stayed with me for years.

I often read a fair bit of so-called "creepypasta" around Halloween - most of it is trash and about as scary as a plastic mask, but there's some treasure out there, especially that which doesn't involved ludicrous monsters or implausible dramatic scenarios. There was a really good bunch of stuff from a guy who claimed to be a park ranger in the US, which I think would be the most existentially creepy stuff I've ever read.

I do agree some written horror really just is very un-scary though, especially if it goes too far. There was a writer my brother liked, who was sort of gothic-ish horror, all puppets and masks and so on, and I just found it pretty laughable rather than scary or creepy.

James Herbert's The Fog? Which is very different and unrelated to John Carpenter's The Fog. Unless you mean The Mist?

OOOOH- THAT would be why the film wasn't the nasty shit that scared me so much, and had less dubious sex and more homicidal sailors in it.

I rarely find horror scary, but I do enjoy the genre. Clive Barker being one of my favourite authors with the Hellbound Heart and The Thief of Always.

If you enjoy Victorian themed horror then I highly recommend David Haynes.

I'm still waiting for him to write the third book of the art. People slag off Martin and Rothfuss, but Everville was published in 1994 for gods sake.

I gave myself the willies reading MR James while staying near the ruins of an old abbey out in the countryside one autumn a few years ago

Im not sure it’d have the same effect in a well lit city

Yes, that one. I am absolutely not saying it's an example of good writing, but as a study in how to evoke a strong reaction in a reader using just words, I think it's pretty potent. In the same way that, say, Human Centipede isn't an immacuately shot or acted film, but still became a reference point for "WOW this is disgusting, have you SEEN IT YET?".