The books that scare me

It probably sounds weird coming from a horror author, but I’m really hard to scare.

The best horror is that which takes the things we are afraid of in real life and turns them around into monsters that can eat us. Stephen King expounds on this philosophy at length in Danse Macabre, his nonfiction overview of the horror genre published in 1980 (significantly before the many twists and turns of the horror genre in the past 40 years, but it holds up remarkably well as a template, in my opinion.)

King points out that the haunted house story is really an economic fear, that zombies tap into our fear of disease, that the complex adult fears of losing love and economic failure are narrowed down into the creepy critters that stalk us on the silver screen. He taps into this concept in his own It, where Pennywise mostly preys on children because their fears are simple: a movie monster, spiders, a clown.

It’s true, then, that the books that scared me the most as a child are the ones that still hold shivers for me, whereas the books I’ve read later were brilliant and fascinating, but didn’t really scare me the way those early books did.

When I approached the idea of writing about the scariest books I’ve ever read, for example, I wanted to list Feed by Mira Grant. Feed is a brilliant book, the zombie novel I wish I’d written, smart and complex and emotional and one of the few books I cannot reread without literally sobbing. But it didn’t make me afraid, even if it’s a far better book even than some of the…