A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown, Julia Scheeres
For the kind of person who — like my mother, WHO IS WRONG — will always prefer non-fiction to fiction. It’s awful, but you’ll be able to sleep just fine after you finish it.
The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, David Shields
For the profoundly secular.
Blind Descent: The Quest To Discover The Deepest Place On Earth, James M. Tabor
For people who want to read about caves (this is everyone).
The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters
Classic horror in every sense. A crumbling English house with a crumbling English family. Repression, loss of family fortune, tiny tragedies, things going bump in the night. Is it just me or is Sarah Waters moving from strength to strength lately? Her latest two books are as good as anything of hers I’ve ever read. The ending was a little disappointing — I’m so often disappointed by the ending of horror novels, possibly because what makes something horrific is what you can’t see, so anything in the way of closure takes some of the fun out of things — but it’s well worth reading.
I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, Harlan Ellison
It’s free. You can read it right now. I do not advise reading it alone on the family computer in the basement one hot summer night while everyone else is asleep and you are twelve years old, but otherwise go for it.
She: A History Of Adventure, H. Rider Haggard
From the weirdo who brought you King Solomon’s Mines. It is weird, it is deeply racist, it has some of the strangest psychosexual politics I’ve ever read (and that’s saying something), and it has a scene where a beautiful woman melts into a hag and then collapses into dust. Worth having read, especially since it’s free.
The Horror Of The Heights, Arthur Conan Doyle
Also free! See how I’m looking out for you? It’s…the premise is that monsters live in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, and the newly invented monoplane takes man into previously uncharted, and deadly territory. But it’s still reasonably chilling: “God help me; it is a dreadful death to die!” That’s a damn good line. I’ve never written a line that good. Have you?
The Haunting Of Hill House, Shirley Jackson
It’s an insult to you to suggest that you haven’t read it yet, and I won’t insult you. But it’s always worth re-reading.
The Things, Peter Watts
(Also free!) It’s awful and it’s perfect and it will only make sense if you have been watching The Thing on a yearly basis since you were fifteen years old, as I have. I cannot read the line “I am being Blair” without going into chills all over.
Tags: books, horror, recommendations
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I think you linked The Things before, and I read it and was suitably terrified. The voice is so excellent; you rarely see an author succeed so well at getting outside a human headspace.
I heartily recommend H. Rider Haggard’s She as well as Ayesha: the Return of She. Unsettling in a way that sticks with you.
Woman in Black by Susan Hill! One of the only books to actually make me nervous while reading it! I wanted to put it in the freezer like Joey did with The Shining on Friends!
(Yes, they made it into a Movie with Daniel Radcliffe, but it wasn’t nearly as scary.)
There is an earlier film version of Woman in Black that contains the single scariest scene I have ever seen on film. I am geeking just typing this.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098672/?ref_=nv_sr_3
Goes beyond the bottom of Mallory’s list. Damn fine horror film though.
THAT SCENEEEEEEEE
Now I want to know more about the SCENEEEEEEEE!
They made the movie in the late eighties. I’ve been trying to find it, because I’ve heard it’s creepier than the Radcliffe version. I mean, in a late eighties, BBC kinda way.
I’ve been trying to find it because the lead role is played by the actor who played James Potter. *dun dun dun*
I threw a Stephen King book out a hotel window one time. I swear that man is evil.
If you turn the map in She upside down, it looks like a naked woman’s body without a head.
The adventurers go into the dark, damp, musty cave– this is a vagina– and emerge out another end, covered in dirt and mud– this is a butt.
(all thanks goes to my Master’s level class on She for these tidbits)
Just think how much more attention I would have paid in English classes if all literary analysis were like this. “Does anyone want to tell us about the symbolic subtext in this passage? That’s right, it’s a butt. And if you turn the page upside down, it spells BOOBS.”
OH FUCK YES BOOK RECS!
*flails like a muppet*
Thank you!
I’ve been one for two with Sarah Waters after she took her turn towards the dark (Fingersmith: yes! Affinity: what the fuck that wasn’t even a surprise, that was what you assume all along, I just read 500 extraordinarily depressing pages for that? *throws kindle*). Glad to hear the last two are worth a go.
I hate Affinity with the hate that remanifests in the comments section of the Toast any time I am ever permitted to comment on books that I may have anything but a positive relationship to. It is THE ACTUAL WORST.
…. AND ALSO BORING.
SO BORING. I skimmed, actually skimmed, in the last third, just to get to the ending I knew was coming in the vain hope that maybe I was wrong. NOPE. It’s terrible.
I’m glad you like The Little Stranger, I only found out recently and by accident that some people don’t like it (??). I didn’t think so much of the most recent one but the least best of hers is better than the most best of a lot of other people. (one thing I’ll say for that recent one is I never read a book that made me so nervous. People will go on about arbitrary division of ‘genre’ from literature, but it’s not arbitrary and here is why: I kept thinking, if this were a romance I would know what would happen: you would know if the lovers were true lovers, and if they were, they would be together. If this were a murder mystery I would know what would happen: they would find out who done the murder. But I DO NOT KNOW WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN. Will the good end happily and the bad end unhappily because that is what fiction means? I really truly did not know. & The Little Stranger is different, it proceeds and ends much as you would expect a ghost story to do, but still incorporates a lot of not knowing, which I respect infinitely and think of as the greatest thing a book can do for me.)
I just finished reading The Paying Guests last night, and I know exactly what you mean. The genre blending hiked up the suspense almost unbearably. Did the scenes where Frances and Lavinia are unable to be alone together after The Event (trying to avoid spoilers) make you think of Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck and their clandestine meetings in the supermarket in Double Indemnity?
YAY stuff to read! I am quite easily scared by movies (went to see Dracula untold on Sunday and although the movies were fine, the trailers scared the pants off me), I’m all good with books.
Can we share recommendations here? The first book to give me honest-to-God nightmares was “To Sleep with the Angels: The Story of a Fire” by David Cowan and John Kuenster. It’s about the 1958 Our Lady of the Angels school fire in Chicago. At one point I was sobbing and begging out loud that someone do something. I can’t read the whole thing to do this day, it haunts me that badly.
House of Leaves creeped me out pretty good. I liked Pet Sematary, although others’ mileage has varied there. It’s a shortie, but A Good Man is Hard to Find is reliably spooky. And I find An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge kinda messed up, too.
Is it scary because of the fire or for supernatural reasons?
It’s deeply unsettling – the description of the fire and the victims, the investigation… something about it just struck me deeply where the scary nerves live.
Ooh, similarly, The Children’s Blizzard by David Laskin was pretty upsetting, when it wasn’t kinda boring (the history of early meteorology could probably be written in a way more interesting fashion).
Oh man. Supernatural and thriller/true crime type books and movies are too scary for me, so when I want that little adrenaline rush of fear I read about people surviving in extreme situations. Blind Descent sounds PERFECT, thank you! Let the claustrophobia begin.
Oh, Mallory, this morning I was driving to work thinking, “But it’s October and I am not in a suitably creepy mood! What is wrong? What shall I do to remedy this situation?” And you, as always, are looking out for me. Thank you.
(More creepy stories: Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You My Lad by M.R. James, one of the leading lights of Victorian horror, and also one of the least offensive Victorian horror writers, which I’ll admit is not saying much but it is something;
The Willows by Algernon Blackwood, do not read immediately before going on a camping trip, or do, if you like waking up your tentmates in the middle of the night screaming bloody murder;
White Charles by Sarah Monette, and also all of the rest of her Kyle Murchison Booth stories, some of which are collected in The Bone Key, but “White Charles” is still my favorite of all of them;
Eutopia by David Nickle, the only one of these not free online, sorry for the misleading link, but this book is amaaaaaaaaazing and if you like any of the above stories you should read it now.)
So I don’t think it would be wise for me to finish reading The Willows (I am very easily scared), but I’ve read far enough into it to find this perfect description of the experience of waking up in the middle of the night and thinking you saw or heard something:
My first instinct was to waken my companion, that he too might see them, but something made me hesitate—the sudden realization, probably, that I should not welcome corroboration…
“Hon. Hon, wake up. Did you hear that noise DO NOT SAY YES IF YOU SAY YES IT MEANS IT’S A REAL NOISE.”
What was it with Blackwood and camping trips?
“The Wendigo”
“A Haunted Island”
Oooh oooh oooh, I have read the first three and I love them ALLLLLLL. James is a favorite of mine generally (and “Oh Whistle” has been making me look askance at hotel rooms with two beds in them for years), “The Willows” will make you fear camping forever, and Sarah Monette does such wonderful, wonderful things with the ghost story genre. [scampers off to find a copy of Eutopia]
Can we talk about “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You My Lad”? Because (apart from the author’s bizarre attempts at humor) that story is terrifying. The title alone is terrifying. WHO IS IT WHO IS COMING?
You’d think the ghost in that story wouldn’t be scary, given that “ghost in a sheet” is one of the biggest, tiredest cliches in the genre. But James took that cliche, tilted it a few degrees off-kilter, and turned it into one of the scariest things ever.
True story: there was a 1968 British adaptation, shot in black and white with what looks like a minimal effects budget. It’s on YouTube, but for the longest time I couldn’t make myself watch it all the way to the end, because I was too afraid of that hotel room scene.
Okay, I am totally watching that tonight on my phone at 11:30 when I am already safely curled up in bed. (Blankets protect you from ghosts and monsters, it is known.)
Thanks for recommending Monette to me! I read White Charles, loved it, found the Bone Key at my local library and devoured it. I’m now going on a holy pilgrimage to read everything Monette has ever written.
Okay, I never got a notification for this comment, but today I was looking through my IntenseDebate history (as you do) and saw this and got a little heartwarming glow. Another Monette fan, hooray! Don’t miss The Goblin Emperor, which she wrote as Katherine Addison after her publisher made her change her name for bullshit publisher reasons.
HURRAH, SCARY THINGS.
Since The Things was recommended, I will recommend Who Goes There? (pdf) is the story The Thing is based on — it’s been a while since I read it, but I remember it being Upsetting.
Also, The Screwfly Solution. (Which does feature quite a bit of violent misogyny, so tread carefully.)
Huh, I found The Screwfly Solution pretty heavily misandrist, which is why I love it.
Oh, so do I! It also is a horror story revolving around the abuse and murder of the entire female half of the species, which is the sort of thing I like to mention to people before recommending it.
The Screwfly Solution is so great. (I mean, and awful.) They made a movie version that I found appropriately horrifying.
My not-so-inner pedant/librarian gets really mad to see it attributed to James Tiptree though. She wrote it as Raccoona Sheldon.
Anything by Alice Sheldon is great. “Houston, Houston, do you read?” is also fantastically misandrist. (OR IS IT??)
WHO GOES THERE it’s scary in a very 1950s sci fi kind of way. I’m glad you also liked it!
Tiptree is so gloriously misandrist and so gloriously terrifying at the same time. Just picture me rereading The Screwfly Solution with little hearts in my eyes…
Noooooooo
why
Why
WHY
NO STOP THAT
NOPE
NOPE.
Sorry! Too scary too soon. I’ll dial back it a notch:
OH MY GOD. Thank you for this.
NOOPE. This is the guy my sisters and I text back and forth to scare each other.
Also, any time there’s a noise on the roof, we all gasp and say “IT’S HAROLD!” And it is him, every time. I bet. I don’t know, I’m not going up there.
YEESSSSSS THIS IS THE BEST ONNNEEE.
If you’re a fan of The Thing fic, I humbly submit my own work, from a few years back. Enjoy.
http://www.outpost31.com/FanThings/FanFiction/tux…
Peter Watts linked on The Toast! Yay! His novel Blindsight makes just *thinking about sentience* keep-you-up-at-night freaky.
The sequel to Blindsight is sitting on the shelf at the library tempting me and yet I know I am not prepared for that level of mindfuckery right now. But! But! Peter Watts!
Seriously, “The Thing” is one of THE BEST horror movies, ever (I’m talking the John Carpenter remake, friends). It has everything: atmosphere, paranoia, creepy special effects and…I won’t spoil it with details, just treat yourself if you’ve never seen it.
Fantastic movie – and it has Kurt Russell too..
Kurt Russell in a cowboy hat.
Kurt Ruselll was NOT TAKING ANTARCTICA SERIOUSLY. (I yelled at him a lot about his headgear while watching it.)
This happened on Bob’s Burgers sort of, where the secret treasure in the abandoned taffy factory was hidden in a cave that from a birds-eye view looked like a butt. In the credits Cyndi Lauper sang a “Goonies Are Good Enough” parody called “Taffy Butt.”
(this is in response to Margot, if it’s not showing up right)
For those who love David Tennant and also vampires
Bless you.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Fright Night is also good for this. When he took off his coat and sashayed across the room in tight leather pants, I actually lost the ability to speak.
I’m a children’s librarian so I haven’t read anything scarier than The Screaming Staircase by Jonathan Stroud (highly recommended, btw) in ages but I bought Mark Z. Danielwski’s House of Leaves awhile ago and I swear I will read it if it kills me!
(hopefully it won’t kill me)
She is just…so…that book, man. P.S. I wrote a grad-school paper about it called “She‘s a Lady,.” 😀
I am reading Pet Sematary right now and it is SO GOOD and SO SCARY, and I have to give my big ol’ former tomcat lots of hugs.
Bleurughgh I really enjoy Pet Sematary but it’s petrifying to me. Once I was reading it sitting outside an old apartment on the side stoop of the house, and the neighbour’s cat unexpectedly brushed up against my leg and I nearly LOST MY DAMN MIND
AHHHHHHHHH
It doesn’t help that I recently read a book of sleep science & have grudgingly returned to staying up to read in the living room after Mr. Violence goes to bed. So it’s just me and the dark and the quiet and the LURKING EVIL AHHHHH
I’ve never read the book, but the movie Pet Sematary totally messed me up when I saw it in high school. I don’t usually scare easily, but it was weeks before I could get into bed without taking a flying leap onto it to avoid the undead toddlers hiding underneath.
I read somewhere that after King wrote it, he had his wife read and she was like this is the most terrifying, wrong thing ever, don’t publish it! But they needed money so ta da, here you go, the soil of a man’s heart is stonier and all that.
I’ve had a terrible history with scary books, ever since being totally freaked out by the creepy bits in A Wizard of Earthsea when I was an overly sensitive eleven year old. That said, I did try to give Dan Simmon’s The Terror a try a few years back. It was frightening in an icy, oppressive way, and the subject matter (the lost Franklin expedition!) is fascinating, but I gave it up after I was only 100 pages in and kept falling asleep when reading in bed, only to have the giant-ass thousand page book fall and smack me in the face.
I really enjoyed the atmosphere of the book, but it has a dumbass misogynistic ending, so I commend your brain for making itself unconscious to protect you from reading it.
Yeah, I’ve since gone from feeling vaguely guilty for having read so little Dan Simmons to learning more about his books and realizing that I had dodged a major bullet. Woohoo!
Yeah they can be pretty generally terrible, which sucks, because the story ideas themselves (and most of the execution) are pretty good. I really liked Carrion Comfort, but that is a SEA of trouble, racially and sexually.
I’m going to have to be profoundly unoriginal here and say Scary Stories 3. The one with the picture. You know the one. The woman with no eyes. No I will not google because then I’d have to look at her again and another piece of my soul will die.
The woman with no eyes picture which I had to cover up with a post-it on which I drew a smiley face. At age 12.
But the scariest actual story in that book was “Maybe You Will Remember”. REMEMBER??
Do you all know Jeanette Winterson wrote a book about the Pendle witch trials called ‘The Daylight Gate’? Somehow I’d missed it, so I’m just spreading the word.
Oh man, I read “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” when I was probably 17 and lost my damn mind. I can’t imagine reading it at 12.
I JUST READ “The Little Stranger” and it was the best book I’ve read in forever. I didn’t find the ending disappointing, maybe because while the reader gets closure, the main character doesn’t really? But it is creepy as hell, and it was my first Sarah Waters book, and I’ve read two more since then and they were both perfect and amazing.
You know, I’m kind of embarrassed to admit this, but…I’ve actually never read The Haunting of Hill House. I know, I know! I’ve seen the fabulous 1963 movie adaptation, it’s right up my alley as far as scary haunted house books go, and yet I still somehow haven’t read it. Anyone want to do a book club-type thing on the open threads?
i’m in.
I would like to!! First I have to acquire a copy. I am nearly finished with Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson which I am enjoying a lot!
I have it on audiobook and I’ve been waiting until closer to Halloween to listen to it, because one of my favorite things about fall is listening to creepy books on the way home from work when it’s just starting to get dark out and the leaves are rustling all around me. Some days my route even takes me through a cemetery!
I cannot promise timely participation in the open thread because of regular Friday meetings, but I will chime in eventually!
And speaking of Shirley Jackson: everyone’s read “The Lottery,” but I really love her short story “The Summer People,” which is tragically unavailable online but is so quietly terrifying. There’s this New York City couple who decide to stay at their summer place a little longer than they usually do, and all the townsfolk tell them that nobody ever stays after Labor Day, but they do — and then things start happening.
[ETA: oh, wait, never mind, I was wrong about the availability.]
My favorite of her stories, the one that scares me the most, is “Like Mother Used to Make.” so terrifying I am agitated just remembering it.
“The Visit” is another Jackson piece that scared the crap out of me when I read it, because it’s a beautiful dream-like horror story that builds implication on implication until you think you miiiiight know what’s happening—but then it ends before any sort of big reveal, so there’s no letdown (and no catharsis), and you’re left with only the awful clammy fears that have been sprouting on you the entire time.
I LOVE the summer people!
Captain obvious here to tell you that all these books are free if you have a library card!
You are like the Ur-member of the Toast. Pro-library, practical, and self-deprecating.
aww, shucks. You’re too kind.
Oh, oh! I want to read about caves! I WANT TO READ ABOUT CAVES SO BAD. The amazon link is busted, though; looks like it should be this?
MALLORY SO AGREED ON THE THING
I never get tired of that guy’s head propelling itself across the floor with its tongue
The Things makes me a little angry because I like the ambiguity of not knowing if MacCready or Childs is The Thing at the end ahhh
Also the answer to “what should you read in October” is always “all of the creepypasta”
A valid point, although I’ll never be 17 and up too late on a school night, clicking endless links and afraid to go to sleep and so reading more and more terrible things again.
I would love a Toast opinion on The Basement because it scares the shit out of me but I also feel it has a weird entitled-dude misogyny to it that I can’t quite pin down? But absolutely terrifying.
I love the IDEA of The Basement and used the whole “someone crouching in front of your door” idea for one of my own short horror stories, but I do feel like…I dunno, all of these creepypasta have male narrators (because, surprise, reddit) and I feel like the characterization of tons of female characters in a creepypasta are written by people who either think women are a bizarre new species they’ll never be able to understand, or they’re just lazy cliches.
Like, I SO wanted to like Perfect Mother because the initial idea and the concept of mommy blogs being exhausting was interesting, but it just devolved into the same old “crazy overbearing mother” bullshit.
YES THIS. Because I find the imagery in The Basement terrifying, and yet you break it down and it’s like…Your mother cares about you? And that’s terrifying? I don’t understand.
(I keep tossing around this idea in my head about differences between horror written by men and horror written by women, and I haven’t been able to make it resolve into anything other than the fact that every review I’ve ever written of a horror novel by a man has turned into “here is how this book failed” and that doesn’t tend to happen to me with horror written by women. Or is it just that women in horror are so rare that the mediocre ones just disappear instead of being lauded with multi-million-dollar careers? I don’t know.)
Actually, according to John Carpenter the ending was never supposed to be ambiguous. If you look closely, Childs breath is no longer visible in the cold. MacReady’s is. On subsequent viewings it becomes extremely obvious, but I never noticed this either until I saw some interview with John Carpenter and got my mind sufficiently blown.
“Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” — I am still haunted by the illustrations and I haven’t even glanced at that book for 20 years or more.
Oh god yes. The stories were decently creepy, but the illustrations just crawl up under my skin and wig me out majorly. Nope nope nope.
That Harlan Ellison story changed me.
I don’t know why I’m bookmarking a bunch of these to read, I’m a huge wuss. I tried to read House of Leaves and only got as far as the part where the main character first realizes the dimensions of the house don’t line up quite right and goes “huh, that’s odd” at which point I was terrified and had to stop reading. I managed The Terror , but that was a horrible idea because I was working in the arctic at the time and my Inuit assistant thought we ran into some ‘little people’ out there and thank god it wasn’t winter or I’d have never left my tent.
… I would very much like to hear more about your encounter.
It is not as interesting as it sounds, sadly. We were out on the middle of the tundra and saw something roughly fist-sized glinting on the other side of the lake from us. We walked over there and combed the area (because fucking around at work is not just for the internet!) and found nothing at all besides some tunnels with little animal trails between them. I figured the tunnels were foxes and the glinting was…I dunno, something, but my assistant was from a pretty traditional family and he said that his grandparents told him about little people who live in tunnels on the tundra that people would run into sometimes. Apparently they are peaceful, but it is polite to ignore them and go on your way so we did.
I just finished Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes, and you guys it is TERRIFYING. Highly recommend, though the ensuing nightmares may or may not be worth it to you.
Ooh, she wrote The Shining Girls, which I loved! I will definitely have to pick this one up.
yessss so good to hear this is sitting at home waiting for me
I wasn’t ever too twigged by “I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream,” but George R. R. Martin’s “Sandkings” is so terrifying that I had to take breaks from the book and couldn’t sleep afterwards.
(I don’t like books about insects/spiders/bugs that try to kill you. I still maintain the scariest scene in any novel is the bit in Princess Bride about the spider.)
Oh god, Sandkings. I read that in some Hugo collection, which is a great way to find unexpectedly horrifying stories.
The Haunting of Hill House is my favorite Shirley Jackson work. (Though I don’t recommend reading it when you’re 14 and home alone at night. That was…not a good decision.) And yes, it does reward re-reading.
I don’t know if it’s particularly *scary*, but it is thematically appropriate–A Night in the Lonesome October, Roger Zelazny. I’m reading it right now, for the first time, and having a fabulous time trying to figure out who all the players are. The only catch is it’s wildly out of print, so you may have to seek out a library or a Perfectly Legal PDF.
Your post prompted me to read a The Thing wiki site. There I read this:
“There has been a debate among fans whether or not that Blair’s computer program’s projection on the Thing is actually accurate since it certainly isn’t accurate in the sense that a biologist would not be working on computer animations as part of his investigations, especially under the pressing circumstances like we see in the film. This scene is obviously meant to be an aid to the audience to understand the Thing’s life-cycle, not a realistic portrayal of a biologist’s studies.”
I love that someone had to explain that The Thing does not portray accurately the study of biology. That makes me so happy. Thank you for reminding me how great The Thing was, which resulted in my finding a wiki site dedicated to The Thing.
I can’t do scary/horror novels or movies at all (my dreams are fucked-up enough as it is) but when I was in elementary school, I loved anything John Bellairs wrote. The Lewis Barnavelt series is the best; The Figure in the Shadows still terrifies me. Less so The House with a Clock in Its Walls but even so I still get nervous and start looking for running water if I see headlights following me for too long when I’m driving.
Every so often I reread “The Figure In The Shadows,” which was one of my two or three favorite books when I was a kid.
I still find it pretty bloody creepy AND there’s a subtext I didn’t catch when I was a kid which I find quite edifying as a “grownup.” I might have to revisit it this month.
I am planning a trip to the library tomorrow to pick up ALL THE JOHN BELLAIRS. Apparently I only own two of his books, and neither one of them is the one in which Professor Childermass reenacts ancient Roman naval battles in his bathtub.
Also! Much of the cover art is by Edward Gorey! In fact, I seem to remember using that as a guide as to whether I should read some of them or not – I think there was a series that was not as good, or another author picked up the characters, and they weren’t as good and lacked the Gorey-ness.
Yes! Edward Gorey FTW! The art for Figure in the Shadows is scarier than a lot of the text – especially the drawn versions of “Venio.” Man, I get bad goosebumps just thinking of the V.
AND Professor Childermass is quite possibly the best character ever. I mean, I love me some Mrs. Zimmermann because she reminds me a lot of my former second-grade teacher, but Roderick Random Childermass, his naval battles, and his fuss closet have their own place in my heart.
Brad Strickland completed a lot of Bellairs’s unfinshed work and picked up the Johnny Dixon series (I think maybe also one of the Lewis books too?) and they’re horrible. Just…bad.
THE FUSS CLOSET. Quite possibly the best fictional invention ever.
O_O I think I just figured out what to do with my finished attic that I don’t use.
I’ve been trying to fill the John Bellairs shaped hole in my heart since I was thirteen.
While we’re talking about Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House: on Saturday, October 25th, I’ll be hosting a live-tweet of its excellent 1963 film adaptation, The Haunting for The Toast, in anticipation of a Halloween-week article.
The Haunting (1963), starring Julie Harris and Claire Bloom, will be broadcast on Turner Classic Movies at 8:00, Saturday the 25th, and there are streaming options listed in the link. It’s a marvelous example of slow-building psychological suspense and repressed terror. I hope you’ll follow along and join the live-tweet! Details are in the Facebook link, or you can follow me at @emilyorelse, or just look for #TheHaunting on Oct. 25th at 8:00 p.m. Eastern.
I’m such a wimp, I’m still terrified by a story I read as a very little kid in a kid’s scary story book.
Anyone else remember this one? The ending surprised and scared the SHIT out of me as a kid, it’s seared into my brain.
Yup. The last illustration of her head and dead, limp hand is burned into my brain. (I hope that’s actually the illustration and not something I invented and burned into my own brain.)
That’s the image. I found the whole story via Google and…yup, still creepy as hell.
Here’s a series where different writers make up their own endings to that story– some of them are hilarious. http://www.themorningnews.org/article/the-green-r…
I’d read a version of this where he unties the ribbon while his wife is sleeping. That one bothered me quite a lot. Moral of that story was obviously “a husband that is a dick and doesn’t respect a woman’s wishes or privacy will not suffer as severe of consequences as the woman foolish enough to trust him.”
This story and its illustrations are why I was so disappointed by the ending of that movie Orphan: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1148204/?ref_=nv_sr_2
If anyone else is starting to get freaked out just picking a book, you can come sit by me and giggle about the name “Rider Haggard.”
just bought best american mysteries 2014 (feat. ROXANE GAY!!!!) which will now be the first in my toast-approved mystery/horror october reading series and i CAN’T WAIT. october is the best month
I’m reading Frankenstein– a nice edition where it compares Mary Shelley’s original draft with the edition that was published (which her husband edited).
Needless to say I skipped strait to her original version.
I heard Harlan Ellison wrote ‘I Have No Mouth” in a single night. One incredibly pissed off night. There is a video game about it too!
Harlan Ellison? Pissed off?? Surely not, no.
Well more than usual! I think he stubbed his toe that night and then broke his favorite cup
Did anyone else read John Bellairs as a youngster? I remember The House with a Clock in its Walls, The Curse of the Blue Figurine and the like scaring me shitless as a kid. Wonder if they would hold up upon re-reading as an adult…
Ohh man, The House with a Clock in its Walls. We had a bunch of his when I was a kid – I’ll have to see if my mom kept them.
Oh yes, they do! I try to reread that one every October (the Johnny Dixon ones too). Every second that Mrs. Zimmerman is on the page is perfection.
Actually, Can we talk about how great Professor Childermass is? And how he and Johnny and Fergy just hang out baking chocolate cakes all the time?
I loved those books! And the Edward Gorey cover illustrations, too. I snapped up a copy of The House with a Clock in its Walls at a used bookstore a few years ago, and I’m happy to report that the creepy-cozy-nostalgic atmosphere I remember is still there.
Can you believe they got rid of the Gorey covers and put some lame horror-looking bs on there instead? Tone deaf! They should be bundling those suckers up into a boxed set (with Gorey box) and selling them to high end retailers!
The eyes of the killer robot……nightmares forever
I LOVED THE HOUSE WITH A CLOCK IN ITS WALLS AND I SPENT YEARS TRYING TO FIND IT AS AN ADULT
I absolutely loved Bellairs and I’m trying to foist his books onto the 10 year old girl I babysit. She’s currently tearing through Harry Potter and it’s so exciting and wonderful.
One time I found a full set of hardcovers with the Edward Gorey illustrations on sale through AbeBooks or somewhere and it took ALL of my financial responsibility to not buy them and go completely broke.
Ghost stories! Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë), The Girl in the Swing (Richard Adams), Beloved (Toni Morrison)
The Girl in the Swing is one of those books that won’t get out of my head, and was REALLY weird to read as a huge Watership Down fan.
I also sometimes (often) wish I could get I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream out of my head, but it is there to stay.
I picked up that Jonestown book faster than you can say “thank goodness for cashback bonus” because it is effectively FREE.
Paging user amanita, I think this would be right up your alley!!
It is amazing, I just finished it a few weeks ago and then went and watched a bunch of Jonestown documentaries! And then had nightmares about starting cults for like three nights in a row!
I hate Harlan Ellison as a fundamentally horrible human being but I cannot deny that “I Have No Mouth” is an incredibly good story.
edited to add: I meant to mention that “The Devil in the White City” is a great nonfiction choice if you like history and also reading about horrifying serial killers.
On a similar note, Orson Scott Card is terrible but the Lost Boys short story is killer.
i met him after a book thing when i was in college and i was so disappointed when he hit on me.
I have mentioned this here recently, but I’m in the middle of We Need to Talk About Kevin. It is damn good, but so unnerving that I had to take a break to read Paladin of Souls.
YOU GO GET THOSE DEMONS, ISTA!
I’ve just started reading the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff Vandermeer, and I’m already halfway through the first book. It takes place in some unspecified future wherein an area in the southern portion of the country was separated from the rest thirty years prior by “an incident” and has become a pristine mystery-place known as Area X. The series is about the 12th expedition to Area X and the things they find there.
This series is amaaaaaazing.Thank you for bringing it up.
Halloween-themed but not scary: I’m In the middle of the 1986 musical version of “Little Shop of Horrors” right now. It holds up SO SO well. I do find the bits with Steve Martin’s sadist dentist painful to watch these days (except when Bill Murray’s masochist shows up). And all hail Ellen Greene as Audrey.
I never found the sequels or the other series as gripping, but The House with a Clock in its Walls holds up like a champ. The funny parts are maybe only still funny if they’ve made your way into your and your sister’s vocabulary as inside jokes that only get funnier with each repetition (“‘Where the clock is?’ asked Jonathan in a small voice”) but the scary parts are scary. When SPOILER SPOILER is following them on the night drive … AUGH. I still can’t handle cars with “cold” headlights.
I nominate Mrs. Zimmerman as honorary Toastie and fashion icon.
Mrs. Zimmerman was a huge aspiration for me when I was a kid.
I love that she and Jonathan are friends, like actual friends and not secret love interests (which kids don’t care about that much anyway, or at least I didn’t), and I’m a sucker for any character whose frumpiness and goofiness conceals a core not just of steel but of EXPERTISE.
Yes! Mrs. Zimmerman was awesome. I loved her! She was like a cross between my awesome first-grade teacher and my awesome Aunt Mary.
I always liked that she and Uncle Jonathan lobbed insults at each other. I still occasionally call people “Brush Mush.” (None of them get the reference.)
Oh god I just remembered reading “Firestarter” by Stephen King when I was in 7th grade and there’s some shit in there that still messes with my brain.
I do NOT want to read about caves. AT ALL. EVER. They scare the sh**t out of me. Brrr & shudder. *Runs to prairie/sea*
That is excellent to know, because I also found bits of The Terror to be interesting but much more of it to be kind of creepy in a not-good, racist/sexist/generally obnoxious way, and it’s nice to be able to take it off the list of “books I probably ought to finish one day.”
(In response to hipster rasputin (thank you for that mental image, no seriously, thank you, that brightens my afternoon) goddamn this broken comment system)
If you want to read a faux-Victorian mystery-adventure that is a silly satire-of/homage-to She specifically and H. Rider Haggard generally, there is The Last Camel Died at Noon by Elizabeth Peters.
Thank you everyone. Now I am prepared for the holiday.
P.S. “The Hot Zone” remains the most terrifying book I’ve ever read. I had nightmares after I finished it.
The comment to which this was meant to be a P.S.:
“Worth having read” is my new favorite backhanded compliment.
One of my mother’s best friends lost her only child, a boy of 10, in that fire. I don’t know if I could take reading this after the stories I’ve heard.
I’ve been speeding through Tana French’s oeuvre and so far it’s been perfect atmospheric fall reading (and made me want to go to Ireland something fierce. I love the way she writes dialogue). Broken Harbor was bleak and so sad, but also deliciously creepy, like an unsettlingly spooky episode of Law and Order.
I have the new book on hold from the library and waiting for it to come in is KILLING ME
I was introduced to Shirley Jackson only a few years ago, and I read ‘We Have Always Lived in the Castle’ first. Then I read The Lottery and the Haunting of Hill House so somehow it got into my head that creepy, ‘everything-seems-fine-but-it-isn’t’ short stories were all she did. So when I picked up a collection of her stories, and the first few confirmed this suspicion, I proceeded to read what felt like dozens of short domestic tales (which were wonderful!) with the lurching suspicion that at any moment…the pie is people! or, the new neighbor is a ghost! or, the child is evil! and they just kept being like, so normal, it felt aggressively not-unusual and that was creepy in and of itself and I’m sure that I got something far different from these stories than was originally intended…So I guess, hot tip to make any story a horror story – believe that it is, and creep your own self out trying to figure out what’s lurking beneath the facade of the normal plot?
I felt pretty foolish when I realized that, duh, she was not a one note pony (I stick by that mixed metaphor). I just don’t know if I can read any of them again without the expectation that something unpleasant is just about to happen and break my brain.
Yes! Mrs. Zimmerman was awesome. I loved her! She was like a cross between my awesome first-grade teacher and my awesome Aunt Mary.
I always liked that she and Uncle Jonathan lobbed insults at each other. I still occasionally call people "Brush Mush." (None of them get the reference.)
O_O I think I just figured out what to do with my finished attic that I don't use.
I still find the Horowitz Horror stories frightening whenever I think of them, which happens all too often.