Clementine the kitten actually is not among the scary things on my bookshelf. But in honor of Halloween, let’s talk scary books.
For my money, the scariest thing ever written remains The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. I read it when I was a kid, and (mumble-mumble) years later, remain terrified by it.
This book isn’t especially well-known, but Tropic of Night by Michael Gruber totally creeped me out for reasons I can’t even articulate. In fact, even though I thought the book was really well done, I refused to read the rest of the series. (Probably not the kind of endorsement an author dreams of.)
Some books are scary both because of the content and the situation in which you read them. I was reading Postmortem, Patricia Cornwell’s first (and best, I think) book, at home alone one night, the house locked up tight, when suddenly the burglar alarm went off! It was a windy night, and we did have a patio door that tended to blow open, so I was 90 percent sure the cause of the alarm was a windblown door and not a serial killer breaking in. But I did stop in the kitchen for the big chef’s knife before I went to check the door.
In 1993, my husband and I were driving through Louisiana about 2 in the morning (home from the Final Four in New Orleans) listening to a James Lee Burke audiotape. I think it might have been In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead. Louisiana roads in the middle of the night are pretty spooky all on their own, even without Dave Robicheaux to keep you company. It’s dark, it’s deserted, and the mist seems like something animate. Out of nowhere, a strange blue light began to bounce off the mist. It was a state trooper, pulling us over. I wasn’t too worried until my husband quietly informed me he hadn’t been speeding. If you’ve read James Lee Burke, you know that late-night traffic stops don’t always end well in his books. Fortunately, this wasn’t a dump-the-bodies-in-the-bayou stop, it was a write-the-Texans-a-bogus-ticket-they-won’t-come-back-to-contest stop. Ah, Louisiana.
One final word on scary books and scary reading situations: Never, ever read In Cold Blood alone, at night, out in the country in Kansas.
What are your scariest reading situations?