The books that scare me most aren’t the most obviously scary. In fact, few of them are ever classified as horror novels and I have no idea if other readers will find these books as terrifying as I do. In the spirit of the season, here are some books that scared the crap out of me:
I first read The Stand on a road trip through the mostly empty (except for farms) fields of the Great Plains. I got so freaked out by this book—the first pandemic book I’d ever read—that I had to switch between it and a volume of Calvin and Hobbes so my brain wouldn’t combust. In spite of this, I’ve re-read The Stand a couple of times since that first reading.
Vinge’s version of a future in which all information is commodified scared the spit out of me because a) it seemed entirely plausible and b) the consequences of destroying multiple independent sources of information meant that “reality” as we know it could be manipulated by whoever “owned” the information.
Imagine being trapped in a pocket universe populated by the most violent and unstable of history’s villains. Just thinking about this book makes me uneasy.
Bitter Seeds, by Ian Tregillis
This unusual thriller got me because one of the Nazi antagonists was so good at predicting the future that the protagonists’ plans were already worked into her plans. How do you defeat someone like that?
I don’t think I’ve ever read a bleaker book than this. The Road scared me because there was no possibility of rescue but so very many ways of dying horribly.
Reading a genuinely scary book is always an immersive experience for me. For one reason or another I get sucked in and can’t let go until the catharsis of the finale. Either it’s the characters or the plot or the premise, but I just have to know how it all turns out. Then, once I’m done, I have to find a way to deal with the emotional aftermath. In the case of these particular books, I’m clearly still working on that.
Oh my… I shy away from pandemic / postapocalyptic books. As a kid I was traumatized by a German YA novel about a nuclear holocaust (why did they even want to publish those, but hey, it was the early 80s…). I have decided not to read The Road for those reasons you spell out. So something tells me I will actively avoid The Stand from now on 😉 !