NON-horror fiction and non-fiction that has scared you...

I really 'enjoyed' Isaac's Storm, too. Similarly, The Perfect Storm gave me chills. The incredible power and destructiveness of the wind and ocean goes straight to the heart of this island girl.

A book I read a while back is still giving me chills. It was about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. The descriptions of how the burned bodies were found really brought home how hard and how hopelessly those women fought for their lives.

From the far reaches of my memory, I still shudder at Norman Cohen's description of the Anabaptist takeover of Munster and a forgotten historian's description of the St Bartholomew Day Massacre. History books are stuffed full of the horrors.

not a specific book, but reading about the holocaust during history at school kept the class quiet

also, whilst bored on holiday as a kid with my grandparents I read their collection of books on the Bermuda Triangle. Made a big impression on my early teenaged mind!

To tell you the truth, I never understood why people have had to go through the trouble of creating monsters when true life is scary enough as it is.

I might incorporate this little story into one of my future works one day. It was told to me by my mom. She said that a coworker had moved her elderly mother into her home. One night the mom started screaming, and when the family rushed into her room, she explained that she couldn't remember her mother's face. She had grown up in poverty and they had no family photos. So, when, somehow in the middle in the night, she realized that she couldn't recall her mother's face, she was distraught and horrified.

Who needs Frankenstein after being told that story?

The Demon Male - because it's so true regarding the reality of being male and the perception of actually being (shudder) a "man", as perceived by some parts of society at the time it was written, it's scary.

callalily61 said:

… Then there was the unexpected scene where the author was walking through a park and came on a small group of men sitting together on the ground, looking up at the sky with eyes that had melted in their sockets and run down their faces.

Scared me senseless.

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Whew! I'll remember that when listening to crackpots who say that the "success" of Hiroshima should be replicated in the Middle East.

That is a terrifying thought and I for one wish those types of weapons didn't exist.

It may be true that the nukes did indeed save lives on both sides that would have been lost in an open war/siege of Japan. Countless would have died from combat on both sides and countless more would have starved in Japan, but it's still hard to accept the fact the the bombs were the lesser evil.

One of the scariest books I've ever read, and one of the few to bring me to the brink of vomiting was The Cobra Event by Richard Preston.

Speaking of The Cobra Event, Preston actually worked in an L5 containment laboratory so what he has to say in that book and his several others comes from someone who's been there and done that.

One of his others (his first maybe? - Nope, that was The Hot Zone) is Level 5. There's also The Coming Plague. In one of them Preston goes into depth on the Marburg and Ebola viruses and several near-miss outbreaks that could have occurred if containment had failed (at least one regarding an escaped lab animal in NY or NJ that was infected with Marburg).

Plum Island is good and is about a secret government bio-weapons lab and research facility only a few miles away from New York City.

Zombie CSU is good as it details the expected responses to and containment of a zombie-plague outbreak.

A War Like No Other by Victor Davis Hanson details the wars between Athens and Sparta for domination of the Greek peninsula. Terror, plague, mass death, and more are all contained in this book. Hanson also relates the events back then to events today.

Most anything about American chattel slavery, especially in the 1820s-1860 United States when things were at their worst. Studying that in grad school literally broke my faith in any sort of inherent decency in humanity. I'm only very slowly regaining my belief that there are many people who treat others well for reasons other than being socially programmed to. Thank God for science, eh? Empathy studies are awesome.

The 19th Wife. I had nightmares that Brigham Young was chasing after me with a chainsaw. And I really wish I was making that up.

Lost Paradise: From Mutiny on the Bounty to a Modern-Day Legacy of Sexual Mayhem, the Dark Secrets of Pitcairn Island Revealed

Man, that's a long title.

Anyway, yeah. That one. A non-fiction book that was so fascinating and well written that it read like fiction. This book *profoundly* disturbed me. Still does. The dynamics of the men and women and children on that island is uber creepy.

I'm sure I have more, but that was the first one to come to mind. I should think on this a little more.


ETA: Thought of another. The Great Influenza. What I remember being horrified by was the body count and the stress it places on a community in various ways.

Hidden Horrors:Japanese war crimes in WW II.

They make the Nazis seem tame.

When I was stationed in S. Korea an optometrist near base told me how he and his brother were forced to train an kamikaze pilots. The Japanese Army was bad news for anyone "conquered".

Helter Skelter
The Hot Zone
Black Rain
Ebola

... to name a few

patskywriter said:

To tell you the truth, I never understood why people have had to go through the trouble of creating monsters when true life is scary enough as it is.

I might incorporate this little story into one of my future works one day. It was told to me by my mom. She said that a coworker had moved her elderly mother into her home. One night the mom started screaming, and when the family rushed into her room, she explained that she couldn't remember her mother's face. She had grown up in poverty and they had no family photos. So, when, somehow in the middle in the night, she realized that she couldn't recall her mother's face, she was distraught and horrified.

Who needs Frankenstein after being told that story?

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My mother had Alzheimer's and watching that is worse than any horror film. But people created monsters to explore real horror in a different form. The monsters stand in for humans or for acts of God or whatever.

I suppose "We Need to Talk about Kevin" is considered a literary novel, but really it is horror, and it's critics should just accept that. It was a book I could not put down, but would never want to read again. It's genius but so vile.

The Veldt by Ray Bradbury

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein.

Reading about climate change terrifies me. (Admittedly, I suspect that's in part because I don't know enough about the science to tell when the author's full of it.)

Ironically, I read old books on nuclear warfare from the 50's through 80's for reassurance. If we made it through that without blowing ourselves up, surely we can make it through this...

Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry
A Child Called "It" by Dave Pelzer.

gingerwoman said:

My mother had Alzheimer's and watching that is worse than any horror film. But people created monsters to explore real horror in a different form. The monsters stand in for humans or for acts of God or whatever.

I suppose "We Need to Talk about Kevin" is considered a literary novel, but really it is horror, and it's critics should just accept that. It was a book I could not put down, but would never want to read again. It's genius but so vile.

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I agree about We Need to Talk About Kevin, except that I have reread it. I love the narrator, unreliable and elevated as she is. I love the slow, horrified realizations that one comes to through the narrative.

kkbe said:

Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry

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/snip

Helter Skelter is what I was coming here to add. It's a book I at time wish I had not read.

As a child, I read books about the nuclear arms race that horrified me, and in retrospect were written for that purpose.

Later on, in college, I read a number of books about the horrific environmental problems that were only beginning to be understood.

Another book that really bothered me was about the history of the Federal Reserve Bank and how it really operates, all the nasty stuff it has done, etc.

GingerGunlock said:

I agree about We Need to Talk About Kevin, except that I have reread it. I love the narrator, unreliable and elevated as she is. I love the slow, horrified realizations that one comes to through the narrative.


.

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Yes I have no problem with the narrator. The book is brilliant. Just as a mother it is too sickening to read. To see him rejecting everything ugggg it is unbearable, but talk about a book you cannot put down!
I consider it is literary horror and those who have written scathing negative reviews about how gross and repulsive it is are failing to see that.

kkbe said:

A Child Called "It" by Dave Pelzer.

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Yes I don't see how anyone could call "A Child Called It" uplifting. It isn't uplifting until really the last chapter of the third book in the series "A Man Named Dave" certainly the most traumatic book I have ever read, and I gave the first two books away to a second hand bookstore because I didn't want my little boys stumbling on them, seeing a child on the cover and starting to read. I still have "A Man Named Dave"

redfalcon said:

Hidden Horrors:Japanese war crimes in WW II.

They make the Nazis seem tame.

When I was stationed in S. Korea an optometrist near base told me how he and his brother were forced to train an kamikaze pilots. The Japanese Army was bad news for anyone "conquered".

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Having been to the Auschwitz site and read several memoirs by survivors I doubt that's possible, though they certainly rivalled them in some areas. Both did absolutely fiendish medical experiments and so on and yes, I'm familiar with their use of 'comfort women', slave labour etc.

One book that was a bit disturbing was called 'Hitler's Willing Executioners' about how ordinary people were often content to turn in their own neighbours for relatively minor privileges, or turn a blind eye to things so long as they were fine.

Even scarier is the rise of neo-Nazism that I see among younger people who don't even have grandparents who'd remember The War. They think it's edgy and non-mainstream to challenge the holocaust, etc. and cranks on the internet enable all kinds of idiocy about race, economics and so on. All of human history seems to be of one group massacring another, then later glossing over it so either they or some other group can get away with doing it again. The Spanish Inquisition seems to be downplayed a lot more now than it did a decade ago or so, or since I was learning about it in school.
Convince enough people that 11 million people weren't sent to death camps and it'll be easier to herd the next lot into them were something like that to happen again.