I was thinking of getting a very scary book. Stephen King comes to mind. I know of The Shining and a few others but what do you think is the scariest of his books?
2007-01-24 07:47:19 · 19 answers · asked by Les 2 in Arts & Humanities ➔ Books & Authors
The Stand hands down. A horrible virus comes and kills mostly everyone and the survivors have to than combat pure evil!
2007-01-24 10:20:11 · answer #1 · answered by Mark M 1 · 1⤊ 0⤋
In my opinion, King's scariest work tends to be his short stories, the Night Shift is a great place to start. If you simply MUST have a novel, the Shining is probably the way to go. A lot of his novels tend to be needlessly long winded in my opinion. However if you really, really want a scary book, I would look to Clive Barker and his collections of short stories known as the Books of Blood. A great novel of his is The Damnation Game.
2007-01-25 02:58:03 · answer #2 · answered by suede672001 1 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Boy, do I ever agree with this opinion: "The Shining" by Stephen King. This 1977 novel followed "'Salem's Lot" and "Carrie" in the King oeuvre and helped establish him as the king of horror. The book tells the story of the Torrances, a young family that moves into the spooky old Overlook resort hotel as winter caretakers. Jack Torrance is a writer; he plans on taking advantage of winter's solitude to work on his novel. His son, Danny, has "the shine": psychic abilities with which he can see the hotel's horrific past. "Your imagination always exceeds special effects." -- "Scary Books" respondent As the snow piles up and their isolation grows, the Torrances start to fall apart. Danny is frightened by his visions of the hotel's past, while his father disintegrates in a stew of alcoholism and his own history -- the memories of an abusive father. According to King, "The Shining" was written in a white heat of inspiration. His family had stayed at a Colorado hotel, the Stanley, and King got the idea while awake late one night. The book has been made into a movie twice: a 1980 feature directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall, and a 1997 TV movie. Though the Kubrick version changed several elements of King's book (to the disappointment of King devotees), it's held up well. Its scariest scene may be one of the most mundane in horror film history: the moment when Duvall examines the book that Nicholson has been working on for several months, and sees just what he has written .." What makes The Shining truly frightening is that it doesn't depend on monsters or even on "supernatural events" to scare the heck out of you; its real horror is that it's the human mind that is behind all the terror, and, unlike ghosts, ghouls and goblins, the human mind is always all around us and, even more terrifying, it is inside our heads. There is NO escape from that. but, since I can't choose "The Shining", I'll go with "Pet Sematary" "King knows a thing or two about humans and human relationships, and in Pet Sematary he creates a realistic family that you care about.... then he does absolutely TERRIFYING things to them. Without giving anything away - I have to say that one of the reasons that this book affected me so deeply is that I had recently become a Dad back when this book first was released, and this book hones in on a new parent's worst nightmares, then just gets worse and worse and worse. If you like being scared by a book, and you can't think of anything worse than seeing your child killed - this book might hit you like it hit me. I repeat: This is the scariest novel I have ever read." "I guess it depends on what "scary" means. But I'd say the horror novel that affected me most - putting me through an emotional battering that became almost unbearable - was Stephen King's Pet Sematary. It was King's frighteningly accurate and empathic portrayal of grief that did it - and how such grief can spiral out of control. What I was feeling got very close to actual pain. Quite an achievement."
2016-05-24 05:06:58 · answer #3 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
The Stand is def the best book but I was mostly freeked out by "It" and the television version wasn't bad either! Usually trying to put Stephen King books to film is a big mistake, but "It" worked.
2007-01-24 08:53:37 · answer #4 · answered by pittsburgh-girl 4 · 3⤊ 0⤋
The Shining.
2007-01-24 07:56:54 · answer #5 · answered by elgil 7 · 4⤊ 0⤋
The Shining in my opinion is definitely the scariest!! I love Steven King, but that one was way creepy.
2007-01-24 07:50:32 · answer #6 · answered by Anonymous · 3⤊ 0⤋
"The Shining" freaked me out so badly, I was looking over my shoulders for a couple of weeks. I was about 16 at the time. I neither watched nor read any more horror for a good few years after!
2007-01-24 09:37:37 · answer #7 · answered by wordwitty 2 · 1⤊ 0⤋
My favorite King book is 'The Stand' - but I don't think that's his scariest. I don't think many of his books are scary actually. They really are just about people.
The one that kept me peering into the shadows was Cujo.
2007-01-24 08:21:55 · answer #8 · answered by zombie_togo 3 · 2⤊ 0⤋
The Stand
2007-01-24 07:49:51 · answer #9 · answered by tchem75 5 · 3⤊ 0⤋
It has to be IT. When I saw that movie when I was a kid I couldn't sleep for more than a month. All by brother's and sisters were so scared. We use to have each other stand guard outside the bathroom while we were in it. We always slept with the lights on. I was afraid to open a photo album, I was in a mess. But when I saw it over I realized how stupid I was to to afraid of it. Part two of that movie killed it. That part was just silly.
2007-01-24 10:10:06 · answer #10 · answered by toonmili 3 · 0⤊ 2⤋