Spooky Stories That Affected You

For our Halloween week writer roundtable, tell us the spookiest or creepiest book or story you've ever read and why it affected you. 

Amelia Sides: Children of Men. *Waves vaguely at our current state of affairs*

Danielle Procter Piper: It's a very short story... I wish I could recall the title or author, but it's published in a book I read long ago. Two medical students are still cleaning up their workspace after class has ended and begin a conversation about how cadavers sometimes move due to a buildup of gases in their decomposing bodies. They've even been known to sit up or fall off tables! As they finish up, they wheel their cadaver down the hall to the elevator to return to the morgue...and a power failure leaves them stuck between floors in total darkness. That's it. I think the story might be three pages long? So, anything frightening that could happen in real life scares me, while fantasy horror is just for fun. This, Misery scares me more than any other Stephen King story. It could happen. It's the difference between the news and a nightmare you had.

Seth Tucker: Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Matheson’s Hell House spooked me. Despite being two very different styles of haunted house stories, Jackson got to me because of the unreliable narrator, which leaves every event in question, while Matheson made you believe in a malevolent cadre of specters enjoying the torment they filed out, and then that reveal at the end. Both of them build atmosphere equally though, which I don’t see as much in more modern ghost stories.

Nick Crook: "His Destroyer" in the Slay anthology. It's been several years, but it just stayed with me.

Jessica Nettles: I have a soft spot for Salem’s Lot, even with the rushed ending. It’s a damned good vampire story, and Barlow is more Nosferatu than Dracula.

I also am drawn to The Haunting of Hill House. I love stories that make you doubt reality. 

Maeve Nettles and I still will quote lines from that book at each other. It is one of a thousand reasons why Shirley Jackson is one of my influences.

Lisa Barker: The Shining. It gets inside my head every time.

Elizabeth Mirasol: I found a book called The Darkness at a used bookstore at an airport. When I brought it to the counter, the cashier had never seen it before. He was very surprised that there was a book he didn't notice or inventory. Sold it to me for 50 cents. I popped it open a couple of months later and the opening scene was a detective showing up at a multiple suicide home in a neighborhood. Very graphic. I put the book away to read another time, but I cannot find it. I have been searching for it for over eight years. Had a scary ghost/monster face hovering over a house on the cover.

Sean Taylor: Two stories. 

"N." by Stephen King. Because the main character's OCD is the only thing between our world and oblivion, I (with my OCD) could identify. It made me feel that even my needing to eat fries in even numbers and avoid prime numbers for volume when I listen to music in my car was more than mere compulsive behavior. 

The second is Algernon Blackwood's "The Empty House." This one is pure suspense and pure mood. If you can listen to this classic slow-burn haunted house tale without getting creeped out, you have no soul. 

John L. Taylor: The scariest thing I ever read was probably The Hitchhiker by Christopher Pike (the story and title have nothing to do with each other). Though as an adult, The Russian Sleep Experiment has challenged that. How scary a book is depends on what age you read it. These days, after spending decades as a CSI, fiction no longer scares me. But way back when, there was Steven King's Pet Sematary and before that Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Lucy Blue: For years, my scariest read was Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Walls." But there were scenes in Grady Hendrix's The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires that left Lovecraft in the musty shade for me--Palmetto bug in the ear is all I'm gonna say. <shudders> But there are different kinds of scary--I put down The Silence of the Lambs and never picked it back up again when it first came out in paperback because I didn't need knowledge of that level of inhuman meanness in my head. (If I live to be a hundred, I will never understand the women who think Hannibal Lecter is sexy.) And The Exorcist (book, not movie) haunts me still even though I read it decades ago. Paul Landri: The scariest lately was Revival by Stephen King. That ending had me messed up for days and days. I was home alone for a few days and I'm man enough to admit I slept with the light on.

Scott Roche: Pet Semetary is probably the scariest one I've ever read. Anna Grace Carpenter: The Thief of Time by Clive Barker. (Which is shelved as Adult, but really more of a YA.) It sticks with me more than Weaveworld. [Those are the only two Barker novels I've ever read.] Chris Riker: Either Salem’s Lot or The Stand. Brian K Morris: The scariest story I ever read was probably I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. It might be because I recall reading it on a hot summer's night in my bedroom. It was hot, and we couldn't afford AC, so I was minimally dressed. During one scene where the vampires crept up on our hero and was about to attack, a large bug landed on my bare shoulder. My next memory was standing at the foot of my bed, but not putting my legs over the side and walking down there.

B Chris Bell: The Boarded Window by Ambrose Bierce. At the end, and it might take a minute, the hero realizes the unnatural. Then you do. Whoa! Brandon Barrows: Kafka's Metamorphosis. Only story that truly freaked me out. Ronald Hanna: “The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door ...” -- KNOCK - Fredic Brown John Morgan Neal: I Am Legend by Richard Matheson and The Stand by Stephen King. I got sick when reading them.