What is the scariest book you've ever read? I'd have to say "Carrie" by Stephen King,which is weird because before I read it I had seen the movie dozens of times. But I started reading the book,and I didn't finish it because it gave me a seriously scary nightmare! (In it I was Carrie and the devil was chasing me!!) *Creepy* So what books made you keep the lights on??

"Fevre Dream" by George Martin would be my first choice as the scariest piece of fiction I have read.

There is also the book on eye surgery I spent the afternoon flipping through about twenty years ago. I remember the diagrams particularly vividly.

The scariest books I remember reading:

--The Exorcist (forget the author--and he didn't intend it for a horror, but for a story of faith...)
--Salem's Lot by Stephen King
--The Stepford Wives by ?
--The Shining by Stephen King

Salem's Lot. Stephen King was at his best with this one.

Is it weird that "Salem's Lot" didn't really scare me? Don't get me wrong,I LOVED it! But I don't really remember be scared by it. The most vivid memory of it is when the main character has to kill that chick he was seeing...yes... very descriptive...

Well I've just started on the epic journey of ploughing through "The Lord of the Rings" for the first time, and it's scaring me to bits. The Black Riders are terrifying. I don't know how Peter Jackson has managed to make a PG-13 film of it.

I agree Stephen King's Salem's Lot and The Stand are true classics. I found the short story entitled "Dracula's Guest" that was added to the novel "Dracula" was very entertaining. "Ghost Story" by Peter Straub was excellent.

Never read The Stand in the winter when the flu is going around. It didn't have to be dark for the Captain Tripps part of that book to give me the heebie jeebies even when I was not involved in reading it.

Somewhat off the topic, but it works for me: Reading a scary book or watching a scary movie? Sing "Puff the Magic Dragon" to yourself. Quietly, though, if in the theatre....you can scare other patrons who begin to think you're unbalanced.

I'm extremely hard to scare... or maybe I just read too many Stephen King books However, after I had finished "Pet Sematary" I felt pretty ill at ease. Yes, actually this was the only book ever to give me nightmares... which may have something to do with the fact that I finished it at about 3.30 in the morning, that I was home alone, that I slept in the basement (because it was an extremely hot summer and I couldn't stay in my own room) and that I was only 14 years old
Oddly enough, "Carrie" didn't scare me off, although this was the first Stephen King book I ever read... and I was even younger then.

Without a doubt the most unnerving book I've ever read is a work of non-fiction - the memoirs of Rudolf Hoess. He was commandant of Auschwitz from its foundation in 1940 till he was promoted to the Concentration Camp Inspectorate (!) in November 1943, and he shouldn't be confused with Rudolf Hess.
Most of the book was written in late 1946-early 1947 while he was in custody in Krakow in Poland awaiting trial. He was convicted of crimes against humanity in April 1947 and hanged at Auschwitz later that month facing the main gate with its notorious slogan.

In retrospect I suppose I was naive. I expected to find an overlty depraved monster, but instead found an astonishingly ordinary man, with a head full of the clichés of the ultra Right of his day and a man preoccupied with doing his job well (as he saw it) and with getting on in life - in many respects not that different from some of my more zealous colleagues and acquaintances.

Time and again, he states how keen he was to make Auschwitz a good (!) concentration camp. He complains incessantly about such problems as the difficulty of getting hold of sufficient barbed wire in war-time Germany and so on. He moans about lack of assistance from his superiors and the outmoded, yes outmoded training his subordinates had received at Dachau. If only the folk in Berlin had listened to him, far fewer prisoners would have died of typhoid, and so it goes on.

The memoirs contain the famous statement that judging whether or not the mass extermination of the Jews was necessary was really rather above his head. Let me quote from the English translation:

"When in the summer of 1941 he himself [Himmler] gave me the order to prepare installations at Auschwitz where mass exterminations could take place and personally to carry out these exterminations, I did not have the slightest idea of their scale or consequences. It was certainly an extraordinary and monstrous order [ ...] I did not reflect on it at the time: I had been given an order, and I had to carry it out. Whether this mass extermination of the Jews was necessary or not was something on which I could not allow myself to form an opinion for I lacked the necessary breadth of view."

Hoess perhaps more than anyone else exemplifies what Hannah Arendt so aptly described as the banality of evil - a phrase that she coined at the time of the Eichmann trial in 1961. (He, too, was a very ordinary little official).

Reading the book made me radically overhaul my view - not of evil itself - but certainly of the nature of evildoers.

The book also made me realize how very inclined we to glamorize evildoers, as if they were in some very obvious and visible way completely gripped by depravity - which is often simply not the case ... I also have noticed with concern the tendency to 'medicalize' evildoers, to try to explain evil in terms of psychological disorders ...

If readers wish, I shall try to elaborate.

Bloomsby, have you been? I've stood in front of the scaffold where this man was hanged. If you get a chance to visit Auschwitz (if you haven't already) I have only one piece of advice: DON'T STOP THERE. Make sure you travel the 3km or so down the road to Birkenau, as only when you get there will you truly grasp the scale of it. Aushchwitz was built initially as a concentration camp but Birkenau was always meant to be a death camp. That's where the famous gates from "Schindler's List" are, and the railway line that comes to a stop by two of the biggest crematoria you'll ever see. It's the size of the place that takes your breath away, rows and rows of huts as far as you can see.

Most of us know at least the bare facts about the Holocaust, I think most people if asked would be able to say that an estimated 6 million people were murdered by the Nazis. But until I went to Oswiecim (the Polish name for this little rural town) I never really appreciated what that meant. The ruthless efficiency of it, off the trains and into the gas chambers. The way they took EVERYTHING these people had before they killed them, even their hair was shaved off to be made into cloth. Nothing you read can prepare you for actually seeing the place, and I found that after about an hour and a half I desperately wanted to get away, and never ever come back. I can't remember who said "The birds don't sing at Auschwitz" but it's very true.

Sorry, I have rattled on a bit.I guess it's unnecessary to say what a life changing experience it was.

Lupetta, thanks for your comments and suggestions and your moving description. I haven't visited any of the former concentration or extermination camps and don't wish to visit any such site of appalling inhumanity.

What interested me about Hoess' memoirs wasn't the Holocaust - about which I was already tolerably well informed, I think - but the insight the book gave me into evil and those who commit it and above all into 'the banality of evil'. I'm struck by the way all the media in the very broadest sense, literature and the arts tend to glamorize evildoers as if it were a matter of the people revelling in their own depravity, or as if evil and depravity were some outside force that inexorably tightens its grip on an individual.

Yes I can quite understand why you would feel like that, I'm glad that I went but it wasn't easy and it stays with you. You're right, these people weren't psychopaths they were ordinary people doing their jobs and following orders, and that's what is most chilling about the whole thing.

Of course, those who committed these crimes did include some psychopaths, and a close reading of Hoess' memoirs suggests to me that he wasn't '100% normal'. None of this, however, contradicts his esential banality and fundamental ordinariness.

Perhaps the oddest feature of the memoirs is that after his arrest, Hoess seemed to take the view towards his captors, 'You're the masters now, so I suppose I must answer your questions.' He was repeatedly told that he was under no obligation to incrimminate himself, but shortly before his trial he even handed his memoirs to the Polish court that tried him. Some see him as the archetypal "authoritarian personality" of the kind postulated by Adorno and Horkheimer, others have wondered whether his Roman Catholic upbringing reasserted itself ... Like many leading Nazis, he was a lapsed Roman Catholic.

More generally, though, I wonder why people love to treat evil as something almost melodramatic. This seems to be deeply embedded in our culture, perhaps because it suggests that evil is something rather out of the ordinary and exceptional and in any case different from people we know and of course from our very own selves. What do people think?

I know that this was a great movie with Jack Nicholson, but Steven King's "The Shining" has to be the scariest book that I remember reading. I read it in college and had gone back to school for the semester a few days before school started. I lived off campus and it was snowing and I was the only one in the house. I was petrified...from a book. I was a huge Dean Koonce fan at the time but I thought Steven King topped him with that one. The movie did not do the book any justice, as good as it may have been.

That's a difficult one Bloomsby, and may need a thread of it's own, I'll leave it to the moderators to decide. But for now I think that our attitude to evil is bound up with religion and culture and, as you say, the need to protect ourselves and convince ourselves that evil is something separate from our daily lives. A book that deals in some part with this subject is David Yallop's "Deliver Us From Evil", it's about Peter Sutcliffe. There's also Gordon Burn's "Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son", one of the most extraordinary books I've ever read. It's about Sutcliffe's childhood and shows how short a step it is from what's regarded as common-place (and relatively harmless) sexism to the kind of hatred for women that can lead to crimes of the nature that Sutcliffe committed. These people aren't created in labs, they come from the same society as you and I.

Agreed, Lupetta. A discussion of perceptions of evil and the way evil is represented in the arts, literature and the media in Western societies would need a sperate thread - in another forum. It's also rather important that this particular topic doesn't remain a dialogue between you and me!

Thanks for your observation, Skylarb. My main point about the book was that I expected a monster of depravity and found a man who was in many ways a very ordinary, zealous official - and none of the melodrama of commonly associated with evil and evildoers.

As for the wider issues, I really must take care not to hijack a thread in "Book Corner" for a discussion of a difficult phenomenon that spans many disciplines.

The book I'm reading now has to be the greatest horror/thriller ever written...seriously! Although,I'm probably not a very good resource seeing as the only horror book I've read all the way through was "Salem's Lot"...that I can remember. Anyway,this book is called "Nazareth Hill" by Ramsey Campbell. My sister found it in the library and asked me if it looked good. I said yes,that I'd probably read it if she didn't. Well,she didn't but I'm so glad I did. It takes awhile for the suspense to really build up but the author does it so slowly and painstakingly you can't help but keep reading. And when the climax comes nothing will want to make you but this book down. NOTHING! You guys,you have GOT to at least try this book. I can almost guarantee you won't be disappointed. But,again,this coming from a girl who has vowed to never watch "The Exorcist" (And I won't!) But this book rocks! It's about an apartment building that used to be an insane asylum. A teen,Amy,knows something is up but no one will believe her. Not her boyfriend or even her father. Very scary,folks.

I've read all of Stephen King's books but to me, "The Shining" was his scariest, and defininitely the scariest book I ever read. "Intensity" by Dean Koontz was another really scary one. Scariest non-fiction was a book about torture devices throughout history.