Horrifying books...
This is another one of my favorite all time books. They are a bit more horrifying and creepy, although I still did enjoyed them and hopefully you will too.
Poe had a knack for infusing with visceral fear everything he published. His characters and narrators tend towards the psychologically fragile and the psychotic, individuals that are haunted by things that may be literal or may be representations of their unsound thought processes. Any way, after their publication, stories such as The Tell-Tale Heart or The Cask of Amontillado maintain their power to petrify more than a century and a half since Poe tapped into the essential fear that we all have that the world and people around us are not what they seem.
You can find it here.
House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski
Put literally, one of the most terrifying books ever published is House of Leaves. Danielewski spins out a dizzying plot from a fairly traditional horror premise (a house is shown to be slightly larger on the inside than is strictly possible) involving many unreliable narrators, typographic mysteries, and looping footnotes that manage to draw the reader into the story and then make them question their own understanding of the story. No one else has managed to do such a dramatic trick, making this novel more of a participatory experience than any other literary piece, which is not necessarily a fun experience, given the dark madness at its heart.
You can find it here.
Rosemary’s Baby, by Ira Levin
The adaptation of the film has replaced the novel in pop culture, but Levin's novel was a big success, and the film actually sticks to the plot and dialog so closely that you really get a sense of watching the novel. Not from the well-known twist of the parentage of the baby (hint: not her husband), but from the increasing loneliness Rosemary experiences as her fears about those around her rise. The tale of a young woman who gets pregnant after a nightmare gets its fear. From the emotional and economic turmoil of a struggling young couple to the basic fear every mother has for their child, so many threads tie into the terror, all expertly knotted into a tale that will keep you awake at night.
You can find it here.
Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
Pat Benatar, the great sage, once sang that hell is for babies. For one particular reason, Golding's account of children trapped on an island without supplies or adult supervision is utterly terrifying: nothing supernatural is going on. Since that's our basic essence, it's a tale of insufficiently socialized people falling into savagery. At the core of this book, you look into the abyss and the abyss stares back.
You can find it here.
The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson
The haunted house is at the top of the list when you think about clichés in horror fiction, an idea done so frequently it is often an unintended spoof. However, Shirley Jackson was no ordinary writer, and she takes the haunted house idea and perfects it. Hill House's Haunting is simply the best haunted house tale ever written. The scares come not only from the malevolent behavior of a house that seems sentient and furious, but from the claustrophobia we witness from the unreliable narrator of the book, Eleanor, whose fall into madness is slow and excruciating and starts only after the seeming relatability of her early persona has lulled us into a false sense of comfort.
You can find it here.
Source of information: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/25-terrifying-horror-books-ever/
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