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.
