Frightening fiction

[Adagio]

I had a great nightmare last night and it got me to thinking... I don't read many frightening books. Is there decent frightening fiction? I mean aside from the popular Stephen King. I've read Frankenstein, The Turn of the Screw and I'm familiar with Dracula. The idea of the supernatural doesn't really frighten me, surely there are some frightening real to life books.

[Pryderi Agni]

Sure. Check out The Castle of Otranto, or Anne Rice's the Vampire Chronicles if you're into more contemporary stuff, not to mention Edgar Allan Poe or even Elizabeth Gaskell.

For an exhaustive list of hooror authors and their hors d'ouevres, check this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_horror_fiction_writers) out.

[Hira]

I found 'The Exorcist' to be pretty frightening.

[stlukesguild]

This depends upon what you mean by "frightening". If you are seeking out something along the line of the stories of ghosts, vampires, monsters... the "gothic" tale... then there are plenty:

Robert Louis Stevenson- Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde among others
E.T.A. Hoffmann- Tales of Hoffmann
Theophile Gautier- any number of tales L'Morte Amoureuse, Omphale, The Mummy's Foot, etc...
William Wilkie Collins- Woman in White, The Moonstone, Tales
J.S. LeFanu- In a Glass Darkly, Tales
Ambrose Bierce- Tales
Nathaniel Hawthorne- The Hose of the Seven Gables, Tales
Matthew Lewis- The Monk
Horace Walpole- The Castle of Otranto
Jan Potocki- The Manuscript Found in Saragossa
Algernon Blackwood- Tales
Guy de Maupassant- Tales... especially The Horla
Henry James- The Turn of the Screw and other tales
Bram Stoker- beside Dracula look for The Lair of the White Worm (rather eroticized horror... in the vein of Gautier

Of course there are other ways to interpret "frightening" in which case novels by Cormac McCarthy, Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor and others would come into play.

[Adagio]

Of course there are other ways to interpret "frightening" in which case novels by Cormac McCarthy, Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor and others would come into play.
What works of those authors would you recommend as frightening?

The idea of the supernatural doesn't really frighten me. I think I'm looking for something a little more real to life.

[Kafka's Crow]

If you want more contemporary 'literature', try Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Shadow-Wind-Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon/dp/0753820250/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1252282189&sr=8-2

Haruki Murakami also writes weird and 'unusual' books.

[joebob]

the scariest books are non-fiction....

[stlukesguild]

What works of those authors would you recommend as frightening?

What is frightening in Cormac McCarthy and many others is a portrait of humanity that is less than ideal. Check into Blood Meridian and Child of God. Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated is by turns comic, magical, and horrific. John Fowles The Collector (mentioned here recently) is a horrific view into the mind of a kidnapper/murder and his victim. Faulkner's novels, such as As I Lay Dying have a sort of absurd Southern "gothic" horrific absurdity. There are many other books that show the worst side of humanity which can be quite horrific.

[Dark Muse]

Some works that are not tradditional "horror" but that I would consider frightening

The Yellow Wallpaper ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

A Whisper in the Dark ~ Louisa May Alcott

Sleepyhead ~ Chekhov

and of corse I love Poe, and his stories can go half and half, some toy with the supernatural, but others are more physchological.

And personally I find the Dystopia can by quite Frightening without invoking the supernatural.

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

1984 by George Orwell

[laymonite]

Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door.