Bisky's Twitterling's Scribbles! discussion

When you're looking for a good scare while book shopping, what themes do you go for? (Or avoid)

Do you find demonic possesion terrifying?

Is the thought of a dead person gnawing on your brain enough to keep you awake at night?

Do unexplained bumps in the night make you keep your torch close?

Or do you just stay away from scary books all together?

Ghosts and dead people wandering about. Creeps me the fork out.

My favorite scary story is "the tell-tale heart" by Edgar Allan Poe. I like how subtle it is and how the horror aspect is so inherent in the language more than the events themselves. So I prefer that sort of horror to stories more focused on graphic details. In general I don't read a lot of horror though. I have a thing for dystopian fiction though which can be scary in a different way.

I'm not easily spooked. I don't recall ever reading anything that kept me awake at night or made me avoid going outside day or night or whatever else.
Heck, I have what people would call nightmares, and when I wake up, all I want to do is go back to my dream so...

I agree with Emma. Poe is very good at conveying horror with subtle or implicit descriptions. I also like Lovecraft a lot. Just the fact that some of his characters don't know what is the dream and what is the reality freaks me out. Then I start thinking what if... and that's it: sleepless nights ahead ^^

I love Lovecraft, too, but I can't read his stuff for too long or my brain goes numb. It's just the language is very dense and difficult to get through. But a story here or there, I love.

This is probably ridiculous, but the scariest moment in a book came when I was reading Pet Semetary, and I don't think it was even meant to be particularly scare-inducing. The narrator was thinking about how all this weird stuff was going on, and something happened (I don't even remember what, haha), and he thought, "This is surreal, like being in bed at night and having a hand reach out from underneath the bed and brushing over your foot."

That was (hopefully) obviously paraphrased because I butchered it. But that sentiment just SCARED THE CRAP OUT OF ME. I kept thinking about laying in bed and night and what would I do if a random hand came out of nowhere?? And brushed my foot??

The rest of the book didn't scare me that bad!

So stuff like that, that comes out of left field, that is what scares me.

I don't generally get scared. Startled sometimes when something comes out of nowhere, but not really scared. When it comes to books and movies I'm really into anything supernatural or having to do with aliens. Demons, ghosts, and aliens seem to entertain me the most.

For me it's those situations that make you think "what would I do?" Like being stuck in a zombie horde, or in the water when Jaws is attacking, that fear of almost inevitability.

Even better when it's something completely out there.
The best example that comes to mind at the moment is The cipher by Kathe Koja. There's this freaky hole to nowhere in like a broom cupboard or something and it does this whacked out stuff.

Gotta say I found The Rats in the Walls toe curling. WTF Lovecraft you freaky git.

Speaking of rats, James Herbert's The rats series, a personal favourite. A freakish danger you can't comprehend, in large hordes. Like zombies but... rattier.

Domain is a favourite of mine :]

I read Jaws while sunning in Maui. So, sharks don't scare me.
I read Amityville (sp?) Horror, and thought the family pretty dense to remain for as long as they did. Note to self: when voice says 'GET OUT', find the front door!
I read Pet Sematary--and was up for days and days and days...waiting for that freaky little kid to come into my room...
Okay, so, apparently, buried pets in woo-hoo cemeteries does the trick!
(the movie version was lame)

Yes Domain was a good one, certainly stands out from the first two books going good all post apocalyptic. The only one I haven't read is the graphic novel.

Karey: it's not that Jaws itself was scary, but imagining being in the water with a leviathan of a great, white shark... Pet Semetary I haven't read. Read Amityville as a teenager and can't say it left a lasting impression. I read a so called factual book on stories of crypto zoological creatures that scared me more. I think there was a jersey devil one and mothman one, Haha.

My mum bought be a book about crypids when I was about 7 and the Chupacarbra scared the crap out of me. The original lizard thing, not the dog with mange that it's become recently.

When I was a kid I read a YA (MG?) novel where these four friends end up in an alternate apocalyptic world where the surface dwellers were these insanely creepy mutants who wore the skin of humans. One of these four friends gets abducted by these creatures. I never did finish that book.

Like, seriously, this was a book for kids.

Bisky: What? Mangy dog chupacabra??? NOOOO!

Speaking of things freaking you out as a kid, Punky Brewster. I shit you not.

There was an episode, maybe a halloween one, where they get lost in a cave or something and her friends get turned into like these monsters. I think one of them was like just a head with spider legs and mangled teeth. Kind if like the head in The Thing. That kind of freaked me a little.

I don't do spooks and ghouls they do nothing for me. Probably because I have worked alone so many times in old churches and other such old buildings. However, I always enjoyed Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected. The psychopathic reality of Silence of the Lambs and of course Psycho along with Fred and Rosemary West, Brady and Hindley who really do sicken me.

I think the lizard is much scarier!

I think everyone has something that unnerves them. Realism gets to some people. I think I'm less scared of real life human monsters because they can be killed, they are human. Fleshy and spongy. They just don't really deserve the title.

When my Aussie friend Kiri posts pix of venomous snakes -- in her yard.

ugh! I hate snakes! Any kind because I know nothing about them so I couldn't tell a venomous snake from a garden snake. They are all things from horror movies!

I mostly like the books, that show humans as the monsters. Basically plenty of S. King

Snakes are friends :[

I hope this won't be offensive, but last time I had a creepy Nightmare.I was giving out spoilers on anything ever created, when all of a sudden Bisky breaks in with a giant ball-pen and stabs me multiple times in the guts, and while I die, She tells me the spoiler for the one book I didn't finish

@Kamil, I totally spewed coffee. LOL!

You just keep thinking that was a nightmare.

*Wipes ball-point pen on cloth*

When I read The Shining in the 1980s, after a time I couldn't read it at night. I was about 30.

I wish I could go back in time and watch The Exorcist while the special effects were new. I friggin' love that book.