Scariest Story Ever

What was yours?

What was the scariest thing you ever – read?

Hmm?

Sure, it’s easy to cite a bunch of scary movies. * It’s also fairly easy to talk about scary events in your life. ** However, it’s a lot harder, I think, to come up with the scariest thing you ever read because, well, to write something that’s scary – truly, effectively scary – is perhaps the highest form the art of writing can take.

All writing has to be emotional on some level, and by that I mean it has to elicit some deep feelings in the reader to be successful. Science fiction stories, by and large, aim to instill a sense of wonder in the reader. Thrillers keep the reader on the edge of his seat. Romances make their audience swoon with vicarious love. Historical fiction, I think, strives to impart to the reader a sense of satisfaction, of filling in historical details, of answering “what if” type questions.

The best horror stories scare the hell out of the reader.

Why is it more difficult to induce fear in the reader than any other emotion? I think it has something to do with the fact that fear is the primal emotion, the most basic, simple, warning signal to the individual that he needs to fight or take flight to accomplish nothing less than his very survival. And it’s tough, extremely tough, to bring this out in the reader who most likely is reading the horror story in a comfy chair in a well-lit room in his cozy, safe home.

So – any thoughts?

For me, I’m thinking of two bits of scariness I read as a kid that deeply, deeply warped me.

The first is The Amityville Horror. I blogged about it last summer, when the semi-lame movie version was on late one night while the wife and kids were away visiting her folks. If you’re so inclined, you can read those thoughts here.

But the hands-down most frightening thing I ever read, I just re-discovered. By frightening, I mean it’s just is too dreadful to contemplate. It’s disgusting, it’s claustrophobic, it’s nightmare-inducing, it gives me the heebie-jeebies. It’s concise, only three or four pages long, and extremely well-written. Not a word is wasted, and every paragraph furthers the fear factor.

“The Graveyard Rats,” by Henry Kuttner.

First published in Weird Tales in 1936, I had the unfortunate fortune to first read it 42 years later. I shudder with the memory of inadvertent enchantment with it at my local library, of shivers really running up and down my body, of the taste of bile in my throat, of my stomach twinging in horror.

I just found that same exact anthology I must have read as a youth, and I reread Kuttner’s piece of nastiness. It didn’t hit me as hard, but it still was quite unsettling. For one thing, I see that the “protagonist” of the work is far from being an innocent victim Young Me thought him to be, so his unpleasant fate is slightly less unnerving. Still, though, I had to shake my head once finished. That story is powerful stuff.

Now, I’m not advocating you do this. Really, I’m not. But if you are a fan of horror fiction and think you can stomach this, you can read it for free, here: ***

http://www.archive.org/details/TheGraveyardRats

But, please, for the love of God, please, don’t …



* For me, Paranormal Activity and The Exorcism of Emily Rose, to name just a few recent ones.

** Just type the word scary in the Search My Blog! thing on the left, and you’ll get a glimpse into the blackened Mirkwood inside my head.

*** I had to click on “Full Text”, then the .txt file, then copy and paste it to a Word doc in order to read it.