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Scariest Book When You Were A Kid

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Anonymous

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I know there are other book threads but i wanted this one as well.

Some Nicholas Fisk books used to scare me - "Grinny" anyone?

Also - does anyone remember a series of story books called "spirals"? very creepy.
 
I always thought the Snow Queen was a pretty twisted tale, packed full of sexual repression and existential angst.
I first read Salem's Lot when I was about 11 (I was a precocious little fu*ker) and that probably warped me too.
My brother had a collection of those old EC horror comics, and both the story and the art was vividly unpleasent.
 
I almost forgot the Day of the Triffids. It wasn't the triffids that were so scary, rather the central premise of everybody in the world waking up blind.
The fact that my (psychotic) older brother lent it to me, to read in hospital as I was awaited an eye operation, gave it a real extra boost.
 
I used to love Nicholas Fisk's books, but they didn't scare me.

What did used to scare me were all the "true mysteries" books I borrowed form the library. Scariest was "Photographs of the Unknown". I had this weird feeling of not wanting to turn the page, but not being able to help myself.
 
HP Lovecraft compilations - I've never been the same since.

I was afraid to go to sleep every time I saw those books, but I never stopped reading them ;)

thanks

Uncle Bulgaria
 
All the UFO and unexplained books I used to read aged 8!

And if we're talking wyndham, I think I found the Chrysalids and Chocky more disturbing at the time...
 
Chocky :eek!!!!: :eek!!!!: :eek!!!!:

I remember the Usbourne Books of the Unexplained were terrifying. Showed all these lurid pictures of ghosts, monsters, vampires and so forth, and wrote about them in "this is what happened... fact!" kind of way. Even Jef the Talking Mongoose was scary in these books! :eek!!!!:

I mean, there were kiddie's books, and full of stories of vampires under beds, and ghosts appearing in mirrors and putting their spectral hands on your shoulder. What's it supposed to do to a poor lad?!
 
The Day of the Triffids is extra scary because it's set in places I know and love. I would dearly love to see something like The War of the Worlds remade as a film set in the original location. Seeing American cities destroyed just doesn't have the same frisson for me.
 
The Usbourne books were pretty lurid, and probably started me off on a Fortean path (see posts passim ), but the "unexplained" book that really gave me the squits was a book from the library on UFOs by F.W. Holliday (not sure of the title, it might just have been "Flying Saucers"). The section that really got to me was about Bender and the Men In Black, especially the description of how he awoke one night to see one of them standing at his bedside, and the description of their "glowing" eyes, along with general scary and menacing behaviour. Heavy stuff when you're eight years old!

From the kiddies' fiction section in the same library came a book called "The Giant Under The Snow", which I can't recall clearly, except for the fact that it scared me witless around the same time. From what I remember of the plot, some children get involved with the resurrection of an undead warrior chief / sorcerer, and a witch who seems to be the only person who can stop it happening. The undead's minions are horrid spindly shadowy creatures known as "leathermen", and I can remember some passages with these in that really gave me the creeps. The giant of the title is a hill-figure outside the town that the book is set in, which saves the day by coming alive and eating the undead! At the end of the book there's reference to an archeolgical dig uncovering a huge shattered skeleton in the giant's mouth area.

Phew, gone on a bit, but I'd love more info on this book if anyone else has got a copy, or can even tell me who wrote it or if it's still in print!
 
Strangely enough, an old pop-up book by Jan Pienkowski called 'Haunted House' used to freak me out a bit.

There was one page where it said '..and every family has a skeleton in it's closet', at which point you pulled lever a wardrobe door was flipped open by a skeleton. man, I used to scare myself half to death pulling that lever over and over! I was a strange child... :D

By the way, if any of you have kids aged 6 upwards, this book is a must get for them! ISBN 0744581230 ;)
 
Shoalin Monkey> I had that book! Didn't scare me though... now Fungus The Bogeyman...
 
The Fungus comic strip or pop-up book? Both were pretty cool, but I didn't find him that scary. Great, so he comes up from the sewers and engenders boils in unsuspecting humans... :rolleyes:

I read Stephen Kings 'IT' when I was about 14. that scared the living crap out of me!! :eek!!!!:
 
Alan Garner... I remember that now! It was a series of about 5 books, set in Cheshire I think.. very weird occult/mythological stuff, a bit sub-LOTR looking back but the idea that stuff like that lurked in the real world... The worst bits were the tunnel they had to get through where "the mud clung to them like a second skin" and they described graphically how they had to crawl along completely flat in the sticky, slimy mud and the darkness... im not usually claustrophobic but i had nightmares about getting stuck and dying in there!

The svarts were nasty but the scariest creatures were the Hounds of the Morrigan. Huge dogs bigger than a great dane and howling like a wolf, with no eyes... (but they could see you anyway)... like Alien! And the scarecrow-man things...
 
I read 'The Giant under the snow' too; can't remember the author though! Except that I believe she went on to critical acclaim with something else...

'Grinny' - still gives me shudders, as it does for anyone that read it at a certain age. Horrible, claustrophobic, surreal and sadistic too; remember the 'wrist breaking' scenes? Three of them, as I recall. I'd go so far as to say that the book influenced my entire worldview; Grinny herself is so utterly alien that man-in-a-suit monsters never quite worked ever again.

There was a sequel, which lost a lot of the spookiness in favour of neo-Nazi violence. It was called 'You remember me!' and had Great-Aunt Emma coming back as a young Thatcher type. Rather nasty, as I recall.

Whilst we're on the thread; at the age of 10, I read a chapbook version of an Appalachian folk-tale called (seriously, I can hardly bring myself to type this), 'The Tailypo'. I was so scared that even after nearly 20 years I still feel faintly nauseous when discussing it. Was anyone else subjected to this little horror story (aimed, lest we forget, at the age group 7+)?

Well, that's ruined my credibility on these boards.
 
I read loads of ghost and horror stories when I was younger. Everything from Corgi reprints of the Newgate Calender, through H.P Lovecraft and Clarke Ashton Smith to M.R James and the Fortean Times. But, those weren't what scared the bejeezus out of me.

When I was really young I had one of those cheap (1 shilling) English comics reprints of trashy American comic strips. Right at the back was a one page strip about the history of the Universe. The last frame explained that in billions of years time our sun too would grow old and die as a red giant. Eventually even the Universe would come to an end. Everything would be gone.

The very concept filled me with unspeakable horror. I threw the comic away in terror, but, I couldn't get this new view of Life, the Universe and Everything out of my head.

When I was about 10 or 11 my aunt gave me a copy of a Penguin book about Tutankhamun, the young pharaoh. I think it was a tie in with the big exhibition in London in 1970. It was full of great colour photos of the artifacts found in the tomb.

It was all really worth seeing. Unfortunately, there was also a head and shoulders shot of the mummy. That gave me several weeks of sleepless nights.

(© symbols removed and replaced with full stops 22/05/02)
 
I found my unexplained books scary (especially the ghost ones). I once borrowed a ghost book from the school library and never returned it because i was too scared to take it off my shelf and look at it. i found the usbourne ones pretty terrifying too (alas, no more) and when i was 9 my science teacher had a book of the unexplained which was my reason to live in science lessons (apart from teh science, of course). I used to like the MIBs.
 
My first book was called 'My Teddy Bear' The contents of the book were fine - I loved it. But on the inside covers was a pattern of different small animals, each peeping around the edge of a book. It was the crocodile that terrified me, so I blacked its face out with a pencil.

Carole
 
I loved the Earthsea Trilogy by Ursula LeGuin. Very scary and explored some surprisingly adult themes for books supposingly aimed at children.

Harry potter? Who's he? Ged rules! :D
 
My dad lent me a copy of the Necronomincon that he picked up in a poker game with some Persian holy men.
Good read, though I probably shouldn't have summoned Yog Sothoth as a party trick for my 10th Birthday. It took ages to get rid of the stains.
 
Earliest scary story I remember is 'The nondescript' (I think it was called) about an old Victorian taxidermic effigy made from a monkey and a dolphin(?!) coming to life... I think they were fairly common in certain circles in that era?

Another pant stain-inducing tale as a kid was the story of the bloke who was found pinned to the floor with a pitchfork thru his neck! I think it was to do with the Rollright stones?

And a short story about a bloke who was writing his last words in a hideaway, as a 'wind' that he'd met in a far off land had followed him and was intent on his death! He'd escaped it and run across the world from it's grasp, but he sat there listening to it get louder and closer...

Oh God yeah - that pic of the Men In Black in the usborne thingy :eek!!!!:

I read 'The death of grass' (John Christopher) at about 12 and the images of the end of civilization abnd the anarchic mayhem that ensued made me think... scarey thoughts!

Stumbling across compendiums of Lovecraft tales in my twenties (!) gave me weird dreams!

I ain't gonna sleep tonight!:rolleyes: :D
 
The Pan Book of Horror Stories volume three, introduced me to Algernon Blackwood, De Maupassant, E.F Benson, Lovecraft, William Hope Hodgeson etc etc. Read em all and never looked back.
 
David Raven said:
Earliest scary story I remember is 'The nondescript' (I think it was called) about an old Victorian taxidermic effigy made from a monkey and a dolphin(?!) coming to life... I think they were fairly common in certain circles in that era?
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I remember that! (If we're thinking about the same one...!). Didn't it have little pointy teeth opr something...?

I read it in a book of short stories in the kiddies library (when I too was a kiddie), all of which were incredibly weird and shit-your-Y fronts scary. I don't remember too much about it but there was another story in there about a woman who got chopped up and IIRC bits of her put in one of those steel filing cabinets. The scariest bit were the pictures, I can't quite remember it but there was something like blood dripping down the front of the cabinet, or hair as if her head had been put in there....
There was another story in that book about a bizarre creature but any details have been forgotten...
 
I am eternally haunted by the memory of a horrific story I read at the age of eleven. It was called 'The Midnight Express' and one aspect of the unpleasantness is that it revolves around a man eternally haunted by reading a horrific story at the age of eleven. It was called 'The Midnight Express' and one aspect of the unpleasantness -


I might have gotten the title wrong though.
 
DanHigginbottom said:
'Grinny' - still gives me shudders, as it does for anyone that read it at a certain age. Horrible, claustrophobic, surreal and sadistic too; remember the 'wrist breaking' scenes? Three of them, as I recall. I'd go so far as to say that the book influenced my entire worldview; Grinny herself is so utterly alien that man-in-a-suit monsters never quite worked ever again.
Click to expand...

I vaguely recall, was that someting to do with aliens/robots replacing some children's grandmother? Nasty wrist breaking scenes and 'eyes left' seem to spring to mind but i must have been reasonably young - someone please supply the plot.
 
What was it about school libraries and Nicholas Fisk anyway. As a kid into sci fi, you go looking for sci fi, and all they have is bloody Nicholas Fisk.
 
The Shining

Read 'The Shining' when I was 11 and it scared the hell outta me. For some reason the movie 'An American Werewolf in London' scared the hell outta me around the same time. When I watch it now, I find it humorous, but not scary. Strange the things that scared me back then.

More recently, I was scared by Dan Simmons' 'A Winter Haunting'.

:cool:
 
At 12, I borrowed my Dad's copy of 'The Devil Rides Out' and scared the daylights out of myself.
 
drjbrennan said:
The Pan Book of Horror Stories volume three, introduced me to Algernon Blackwood, De Maupassant, E.F Benson, Lovecraft, William Hope Hodgeson etc etc. Read em all and never looked back.
Click to expand...

That was about the first horror story book I read, too! All pretty scary stuff at the time, if I remember.

Carole
 
someone please supply the plot.
Click to expand...

Certainly, Mr Y...SPOILERS, just in case.



Brother, sister and friend are startled when 'Great Aunt Emma', of whom they have never heard suddenly comes to stay. To cut a long story short, they realise that they don't actually have a GAE and every time she says 'You remember me!' to an adult, they suddenly do remember her; she effectively edits herself into their lives.

She is (of course) an alien machine, a kind of probe designed to evaluate our species prior to colonisation. The thing that stuck in my mind was the sheer sadism of it; she breaks her hand off, falling on the ice, then later breaks one of the children's wrists as a punishment. And then lets one of the kids break her hand off again, just to prove it can be done...

We never find anything out about her superiors, except that, after the invasion, human lifespan will be 'two score years. You may quote me". There are horrible concentration camp allusions all the way through...brr.
 
Doesn't she glow in the dark, too?

Ah, I used to love Nicholas Fisk books. I recall a scary short story of his about a boy finding a hole in a bedroom wall that returns objects in a weird state when you put them inside. He eventually goes through the hole himself and returns bigger and with golden eyes and a sinister demeanour to frighten his sister. Then he tries to force her through the hole and... that was it! You never found out what happened.

I never understood the ending of Trillions, either.
 
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