Must Read Horrors...

Did you read a book that kept you up for a week?
Did you close your closet door before closing your eyes?
Share the spooky experience. Please list the title, author, and a breif synopsis of your favorite horror stories.

The Witching Hour, by Anne Rice

Synopsis (from Amazon.com)
Rowan Mayfair is a neurosurgeon with an extraordinary power to heal. Sailing off California she rescues Michael Curry, whose brush with death leaves him with strange sensory powers. The two form a passionate alliance, as they set out to discover the key to his gift and her past.

The Necroscope series, by Brian Lumley, is, without a doubt, the most fascinating vampire series I’ve ever read. Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot scared the crap out of me as a kid but Lumley took vampirism in a direction that I’d never seen before and the main character, Harry Keogh, was so utterly likeable that I devoured each book in the series.

Synopsis (from back cover of book):
Dead men tell no tales. Except to Harry Keogh, Necroscope. And what they tell him is horrifying.

In the Balkan mountains of Rumania, a terrible evil is growing. Long buried in hallowed ground, bound by earth and silver, the master vampire schemes and plots. Trapped in unlife, neither dead nor living, Thibor Ferenczy hungers for freedom and revenge.

His only opponent: Harry Koegh, champion of the dead and the living.

To protect Harry, the dead will do anything--even rise from their graves!

The Amityville Horror, by Jay Anson--not the movie (never saw the movie, you think I'm TOTALLY nuts?) Man oh man I've never BEEN so freaked out.

That whole "I swear to God it's a true story, it happened just like this" thing? I'm a total sucker for it. I still sit wide-eyed around camp fires listening to ghost-stories and jump and shriek when someone yells "Boo."

One Amazon review says:

First of all... this is the only book that I have ever read that has literally scared me. It has great descriptions of all of the horrible events that happened in that house, and even away from the house (in the case of the preist.) I honestly had trouble sleeping while I was reading this book and was scared to turn off my lights again for awhile. I think some of the scariness of this book has to do with the fact that it IS a true story. This is a great story and great, fast read. And it is SCARY AS HELL! Much better than the movie! If you like to be scared, get this book!

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Interestingly enough there's a whole disagreement among even the fans of the book as to whether or not any or all of it really happened; which, of course, only heightens the tension and mystique of the whole story.

I still like 'The Shining' best.

AQ--I loved "The Shining" (well, all except for the animated hedge-animals...that just didn't really work for me)

And "Pet Semetary" was pretty darn spooky, too...

Yep. He's my hero. (I wouldn't mind a page out of his bank-book either!)

MacAl, I thought they had come out and admitted that they made up the story of Amityville over a couple bottles of wine one night.

H--they may well have, but there are a number of fans and "researchers" who hotly dispute the whole bottle-of-wine story...

www.warrens.net/amityvill.htm

www.amityvillehorrortruth.com/

www.prairieghosts.com/amityville.html

Whether you believe it or not (and I'm honestly inclined towards "not" --being a cynical old hag) The thing resonates. Dunno why or how, but it does. The book came out in what, 1979? Heh. If I can write a story people argue about 25 years later, I'll be a happy camper.

MacA, all I can say is "argh."

I should mention that I find Lumley unreadable. He may be a great storyteller, but I'll never be able to enjoy him.

I'll recommend:

The Haunting of Hill House

Best of H.P. Lovecraft

Conjure Wife/Our Lady of Darkness

and of course, Dracula

Anything by H.P. Lovecraft is the best!

I also LOVE Clive Barker, although some of his stuff goes a little beyond just being horror, but The Great and Secret Show is awesome.

Oh, and Neil Gaiman's Coraline. Freaky story about a little girl and a creepy, alternate world.

Ghost Story by Peter Straub
The Dunwich Horror by Lovecraft
Black House by King and Straub (although this piece is probably nearer to "weird fiction."

It by King
Hideaway by Dean Koontz

I think the scariest horrors are the ones based on true stories...

I remember watching a documentary of a medical examiner on cable...

One was about a serial killer who mudered prostitutes and poked their eyes out. They caught the killer but he claimed his innocence. Yet in his cell you can see numerous pictures he drew of just...eyes.

Another was of a psychiatrist who fell in love with one of his patients. She died, but he brought her body back to his home. He had made a ceramic mask for her decayed face as well as put a tube in her for...necrophilia. Her sister found out and the authorities broke in and found her body. She was later buried in a secret place so he couldnt find her. I forgot what happened to him after but it had to do with his memory of her still....

now THIS scares me....

To think there are actual people out there. So the next time you go outside, look very close at every single person that you pass by.

And remember these famous words:

Darkness falls across the land
The midnite hour is close at hand
Creatures crawl in search of blood
To terrorize y’awl’s neighbourhood
And whosoever shall be found
Without the soul for getting down
Must stand and face the hounds of hell
And rot inside a corpse’s shell
The foulest stench is in the air
The funk of forty thousand years
And grizzy ghouls from every tomb
Are closing in to seal your doom
And though you fight to stay alive
Your body starts to shiver
For no mere mortal can resist
The evil of the...thriller

Ok someone start moonwalking

:gone

I think the scariest story I ever read was Poe's Tell Tale Heart. I remember laying awake and staring at the ceiling thinking of that one when I was just a kid.

Reading "legend of sleepy hollow" as a kid...

Reading "IRS noticel saying i owed a few grand" as an adult



:rofl

Reading "IRS noticel saying i owed a few grand" as an adult

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That's not a horror story. That's a reoccuring nightmare. :ack

I think the scaryest story I ever read was "The Little Engine that Could."

I was thinking Chicken Little.

The sky is falling?

Shiver me timbers.

Yikes.

:gone

DarkFall by Koontz. My favorite of his.

I think my DK favorite is still Lightning -- but I'm liking the Christopher Snow books a lot, too.

My fave Koontz is Watchers. Read it twice. Liked Lightning too, though.

My fave DK book has and always will be Phantoms. It was the first book of his I ever read.

Also, Intensity. A young woman trapped with a serial killer. Oooh, scary! (The entire time I read that story, I kept thinking "What would I do in this situation?")

Never read those, Spook. Will have to add them to my reading list.--L.

I don't read horror anymore but devoured plenty years ago. None scared the willickers out of me more than The Exorcist. Probably because of my early grounding in Catholicism.

The book made such an impact on me that I refused to see the movie until many years after it came out. I waited until it came out on commercial tv reasoning that the commercials would give me periodic "sanity-saving" timeouts. It still gave me some jolts though.

Oh yeah, Exorcist !! Scared me then....scares me still.Several movies from that time period, 'The Omen','The Shining'.... something about possession in general, :ack gets me good !!!!
Carybelle

<Font face="Copperplate Gothic Bold" size="9">Twelve Days of Terror</font>, if you read JAWS then you would love this book because this is a true story of some shark attacks that happened in New Jersey. They play into the short story I am currently working on. Then pick up Bone Chills by Terry Lloyd Vinson.