There is a topic about the scariest movie you ever watched; let's do the same for books.

When I was twelve I read "Krabat" by Otfried Preußler. This book really scared me out of my wits; I had nightmares after finishing it. While it is considered to be a children's book (age group 12-16) it is definitely a good read for adults too. It was published under different names in English translation ("The Satanic Mill", "The Curse of the Darkling Mill", "Krabat" and "Krabat and the Sorcerer's Mill"). Highly recommended by me.

"Melmoth the Wanderer" by Charles Maturin is another book I found extremely scary. The most scary part for me was something many others might not find scary at all: The tale about how the nature child is slowly being corrupted by Melmoth. For me this was almost unbearably scary.

"At the Mountains of Madness" by H. P. Lovecraft. Actually almost nothing happens while the two scientists go deeper and deeper into the ancient city in the Antarctic, but the atmosphere is incredibly creepy.

That's a tough one, I have very different reactions to books than movies. I'm a very visual individual.

Admittedly I'm not a worldly reader, that's my wife's thing.

I can state this. There is one, and only one, book that I actually had to put down and walk away from while I was reading it. Stephen King's 'Misery'. Specifically the hobbling of Paul Sheldon. It sent a wave of anxiety through me like nothing else I've ever read. It may be because I had suffered a traumatic ankle injury as a teen and it brought back the feeling in an almost PTSD way.

But as far a scary...I guess the Shinning, but not really.

I enjoyed The Rats books, but found Fluke far more unsettling, and he wrote it deliberately to be so. It confronted serious questions about the nature of man, death, and what becomes of us without ever descending into naked “shock horror”.

I used to read a lot of horror and sci-fi when I was younger. These days I rarely do, and find more than enough horror in reading biographies or discussions about the state of man. I am presently reading The Madness of Crowds by Douglas Murray, which is hard going, but excellent in its exposition of the social meeja and woke culture we live in. Far scarier than being eaten by a load of vermin.

Sadly it's true...

Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Stephen King's Salem's Lot were genuinely scary as well. And a special shout out to Edgar Allan Poe for scaring the crap out of me when I was a kid.

I must admit, though, that I find Clive Barker to be the best as far as delving into the unknown and weird.    I tend to recall the scenes he writes the most out of every author, even though I am an avid Stephen King fan.  I find Peter Straub one of the best for atmosphere and making monsters out of humans.  Also, I was surprised at how Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is so different from what popular culture has made it out to be.

As far as Cormac McCarthy, "The Road" didn't affect me quite as much as what "Blood Meridian" did.  Out of all the scary things out there, humans are always the worst.

At school I read all the Pan Book Of Horror Stories and also a book called the Supernatural Omnibus which had some of the best ghost stories ever written. There is one that made a massive impression on me and that I could recite if necessary . It was about a couple who meet a stranger on ship and he basically tells them about his haunted house. They think he is telling porkies but in the end decide to take him up on his offer to stay over for one night in the most haunted part of the house.

I can tell you that even thinking about what happens still gives me a severe case of the goose bumps! It's very clever and based on the ide that they think he has created an apparition to deliberately fool them , that is until it becomes very obvious that's not the case. Shivers all down my spine.

"Uncle Silas" by Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu gave me the creeps when I read it at age 14.

and I have to agree with Friede that "Krabat" is a really scary book. I read it on her recommendation; it is in my opinion much too terrifying for a kid

'The Descent' by Jeff Long, a late 90's novel; I read it in my twenties.  

It's about an excavation kilometers into the earth and, guess what..  there really are demons down there, nasty ones.

BaldFriede wrote: "At the Mountains of Madness" by H. P. Lovecraft. Actually almost nothing happens while the two scientists go deeper and deeper into the ancient city in the Antarctic, but the atmosphere is incredibly creepy.

Not long ago I grabbed a Lovecraft compilation on the street. I found 'The Dunwich Horror' brilliant. How he manages the suspense... the plot is about a guy who has to spend the night in a town to study the surreal and deep bonds of the town with the sea and/or a wreckage.

'Insomnia' by Stephen King got me a week of sweaty nightmares.

Others worth mentioning: Lestat by Anne Rice (the part of the druids.. phew!), Michael Crichton's 'Sphere' and, also of vampires, Douglas Clegg's 'The Priest of Blood' has its moments.

Asimov's 'Tales of the Occult' has one or two good ones I think. I'll see if I can find my copy.

Thanks. That's brought back some fond memories of reading those Horror compilations as a kid, and some really good stories too. Which reminded me of probably the best sets of short stories I've read; and whilst I read them when I was quite a bit older, and therefore not scary, they were The Books of Blood by Clive Barker. They were so well thought out and written so well I wonder what went through his mind to think up stuff like that. I also loved the early books of Clive Barker too - the later ones (post Imajica), not so much.

I actually once wrote a short story named "Insomnia" that was kind of a mockery of many horror stories and novels - the kind of story in which the hero tells you at the beginning that he really should not tell you about this, and then he goes and tells it anyway. There are countless stories and novels like this.

In my story you are told of a before and an after situation. In the before situation there is a beautiful landscape with a proud castle in which a beautiful young man lives, and in the after situation everything in the landscape has died, the castle lies in ruins and the young man has aged long before his time. But he never tells why. The last words in the story are: "No, I must never tell you what happened, for if you knew how could you bear to live on? Nobody must ever know what happened, and so I take this terrible secret with me to my grave".

Now I don't remember much about SK's Insomnia, but my nightmares were about conventional thieves or thugs chasing through stairs or something. I have had many scary nightmares, more fantastic ones, maybe in part because I read at nights, but those left me sweating like no other, I don't know why.

It's funny how *not knowing* is in itself a source of fear.

Also made me remember those child games in which they start to tell a frightening story only to end shouting and pointing at you!

My story began like this:

"In night's restless insomnia. The ho, the ho, the ho and the ho-ho-ho. Insectous nocturno, reptilious inferno". Mark that this secretly shows that the writer is very religious because "I.N.R.I." appears in the first and third sentence. The writer is afraid of the sounds of the night, which he tries to express in his second sentence.

In the following sentences he describes the sounds of the night in detail. I made a lot of use of onomatopoeia in this part of the story. This part is very difficult to translate into English (the story was written in German) because onomatopoeia vary greatly between different languages.

Later he muses about his reasons for living there. This part begins with: "Why do I live here? What evil spirit forces me to seek refuge in this mockery of a house, once lordly, now only a decomposed ruin? Ah, but you don't understand - the house and I belong together; we share the same fate".

Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" definitely was an influence for this story, but it goes into a very different direction.

'The Ceremonies' by TED Klein

HP Lovecraft tales

'Ghost Story' by Straub

Books by Ramsey Campbell....'The Parasite', 'The Nameless,' etc

Easy ....

MATHEW GREGORY LEWIS ... The Monk

The monk whose big sin is pride and who winds up with smashed bones in a hot valley after sleeping with his sister and killing his mother.