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.
Last edited by Adagio; 09-06-2009 at 11:37 AM.
Only an idiot has no grief; only a fool would forget it. What else is there in this world sharp enough to stick to your guts? - Faulkner
I found 'The Exorcist' to be pretty frightening.
Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
From Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard ~ Thomas Gray
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.
Beware of the man with just one book. -Ovid
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.- Mark Twain
My Blog: Of Delicious Recoil
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What works of those authors would you recommend as frightening?Originally Posted by stlukesguild
The idea of the supernatural doesn't really frighten me. I think I'm looking for something a little more real to life.
Only an idiot has no grief; only a fool would forget it. What else is there in this world sharp enough to stick to your guts? - Faulkner
If you want more contemporary 'literature', try Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Shadow-Wind-...2282189&sr=8-2
Haruki Murakami also writes weird and 'unusual' books.
"The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the sh1t the more I am grateful to him..."
-- Harold Pinter on Samuel Beckett
the scariest books are non-fiction....
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.
Beware of the man with just one book. -Ovid
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.- Mark Twain
My Blog: Of Delicious Recoil
http://stlukesguild.tumblr.com/
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
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before. ~ Edgar Allan Poe
Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door.
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