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patricia-von-arundel · 1 year

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It's Friday the 13th! Here's a list of 13 of my favorite scary books.

(If you have any particular triggers you're concerned about, feel free to send me a message about any of these! Please do not risk putting yourself in a bad place! I never mind giving a heads up on this kind of thing.)

General trigger warnings: sexual content, pedophilia, rape/sexual assault, extreme violence, deaths of children, deaths of animals, physical abuse, pregnancy, gore.

1. Let's deal with the reigning monarch first - Stephen King. I'll just let him have one entry for several books, since the guy has written 18 million.

1a. It. I read It, and then immediately read it again, for the first time when I was 12 years old. I carried the book around like a Bible. Not only is it truly scary as hell (the history, the deaths of Edward Corcoran and Patrick Hockstetter, and overall the idea that some things, no matter how far you run, you cannot escape - only try desperately, again, to destroy), it also has some of King's most solid characters, and an ending that isn't a total crap-out. He couldn't write great female characters then or now, but Beverly is far from his worst. And there is that scene near the end, but it's brief and easy enough to skip. 1,200 pages of story managed to work when I was a kid, and they still work now, even looking at the whole differently.

1b. Any of King's short story anthologies. I'd say my favorites are Night Shift, Nightmares and Dreamscapes, and Everything's Eventual, but they're all pretty great. The guy really shines in short form. And I dare you to read "The Jaunt" and not feel at least a little freaked out at the end.

1c. Different Seasons - the stories are far less supernatural, and it works. The four novellas are all tight, and all very different. Apt Pupil is one of the creepiest things I've ever read, and there's nary a ghost or beastie to be found.

1d. Christine, Pet Sematary, Salem's Lot, Desperation/The Regulators - the opposite of the above. These are pure supernatural terror, and a hell of a lot of fun. If Different Seasons is the drama looking for award nominations, these are the slasher flicks you watch with your friends while screaming at the characters and tossing popcorn at the screen. (Cujo's another one, but since it's rabies, it's a little more real-world.)

2. Let the Right One In, John Ajvide Lindqvist - an absolutely terrifying book where the scariest thing is not the vampire. Oscar and Eli are one of the sweetest platonic love stories I've ever read, and the bad guys absolutely get what's coming to them. It's a bleak look at suburban childhood - and desperation for something more.

3. In the Miso Soup, Ryu Murakami - this book sets you up for an uncomfortable time, and only gets worse. Short, tight, and terrifying. Murakami is more well-known for Audition, but I found this one far more disturbing. His stuff generally is not for those with sensitive stomachs.

4. Battle Royale, Koushon Takami - the movie is good. The book is better. Once you get past the slightly rocky translation, this one's going to have your adrenaline going from the very beginning. There's not going to be any Hunger Games-esque changing of rules: of 42 students, only one can survive. (I do not recommend the manga. It's mostly torture porn - sometimes literally. It's more disgusting than frightening, and while that doesn't automatically make me dislike a book - see just above this one! - I felt here that it was an unnecessary addition that actually draws away from the horror of kids forced to kill one another in favor of shock value.)

5. Ghost Story, Peter Straub - if there's ever been a horror writer who could easily have made the jump to awards-winning literary fiction, it was probably Peter Straub. Don't expect easy answers or easier scares here. Ghost Story is a very, very slow burn, where even as answers start to appear, so does a creeping fear you never even noticed until it already has you in its grip.

6. The Ritual, Adam Nevill - okay, I'm one of those who doesn't like the weird stuff that pops up near the end (you'll know it if you get to it), but the first 2/3 of the book? Holy shit, good luck turning the lights off before bed. It's rare that a book terrifies me. This one did. In the best way. Too bad about that last bit, which I mostly find ridiculous. 🤷‍♀️

7. The Passage, Justin Cronin - another contender for being closer to literary fiction with a veneer of scare. The first part is tighter than the end (and this is only the first part of a trilogy), but the whole is excellent, and the level of character development is as deep as any I've found in horror. When you feel sorrow and kinship even for the monsters (both human and otherwise), you're in good hands. Or bad ones, I suppose! I've read this one, like It, several times despite the extreme length, and it's always a ride.

8. Books of Blood, Clive Barker - short stories from a guy who not only never pulls punches, he'll start hitting harder just when you think you've gotten used to the pain. It has a story called "Midnight Meat Train," for god's sake! Just give it a go. This is pure horror, and you'll find both hardcore splatter and intelligent presentation.

9. The Final Girls Support Group, Grady Hendrix - a lot of fans of Hendrix actually dislike this one, but I found it a ton of fun, even if I also wanted to smack basically all the characters. 😅 It's just dumb fun jumping off of the same dumb fun as the movies that gave us the concept of final girls. If you ever wondered how Laurie or Nancy did after the end of their endless franchises, give this one a go. (If those names mean nothing to you, try Horrorstör instead!)

10. 20th Century Ghosts/Full Throttle/Strange Weather, Joe Hill - like his rather well-known dad, Joe Hill (legally Mr. Joseph Hillstrom King) has the horror gene, and it manifests best in his shorter work. His novels are good, but his quick-punch short stories and novellas are better. (Bonus points that in one story in Strange Weather, his main character is a butch lesbian, and while he clearly tries hard, it's... well. Let's say "a valiant attempt.") If you saw The Black Phone, it's based on one of his stories. (I hear Locke and Key, his comic series, is also amazing, but I haven't read it.)

11. Swan Song, Robert McCammon - Robert McCammon has never gotten much attention outside of horror circles, and I genuinely don't know why! Like Peter Straub and Justin Cronin, McCammon's stuff is more akin to literary fiction than "paperbacks from hell." This one is a take on apocalypse, and it does it amazingly. Many people cite The Stand as one of their favorite Stephen King novels, but I think McCammon did the same idea much, much better. Give it a go! His other books are excellent, too.

12. The Book of Accidents, Chuck Wendig - I went into this one blind, and loved it. It was creepy, the characters are interesting, and it honestly presented twists I never saw coming. Many Wendig fans say Wanderers (and its recent sequel) are better, but I haven't read them yet. They're on my list for this year!

13. The Gone series, Michael Grant (6 volumes, with another 3 in a sequel series) - these are YA, but they hit like a truck. What begins as a veneer of weirdness just gets crazier, bloodier, and darker. It's a quick read, and I swear, once I got past what initially seems like a snooze-fest main character and "meh" plot in the first book, I didn't put them down until I'd finished them all. These books are dark. Grant is also excellent at writing characters often reduced to stereotypes in horror (including female and LGBT+ characters). (As an aside, he [uncredited] helped write the Animorphs books with his wife, so if you liked those, you'll probably enjoy the equally well-developed-but-hard-hitting material in Gone. He and Katherine Applegate are also the parents of a transgender woman that they have fully accepted as a daughter instead of a son, and are vocal advocates of trans rights, as well as the Black Lives Matter movement. Solid people I very much admire!)

Thirteen seems the appropriate number to end on, but if you're looking for more, a few additional names you might seek out: Natsuo Kirino, Scott Thomas, Dan Simmons, Stephen Graham Jones, Nick Cutter*, Otsuichi, Poppy Z. Brite*, Ronald Malfi, Jason Pargin, Shaun Hutson*, Lee Mountford*, Jack Ketchum*, John Saul, Kelly Link, Ramsey Campbell, Alma Katsu, Katherine Dunn, Lee Mandelo, Paul Tremblay, Gretchen Felker-Martin*, Shirley Jackson, Max Brooks, Graham Masterton, Jeff Strand, Lisa Tuttle, Tim Lebbon, James Herbert, Josh Malerman, Catriona Ward, Richard Chizmar, Kealan Patrick Burke, Brian James Freeman, Bentley Little, Simon Clark, William Peter Blatty, Norman Partridge. Also check out the publications of Cemetery Dance and Valancourt Books!

*Extreme content warning

I will not and will never insult your intelligence by recommending Dean Koontz.

Happy chills! 😁

(And if you ever want personalized recommendations based on what scares you - or not! - drop me a message!)

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hotmess-exe · 2 years

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I'm asking you about your favourite OC😌 anything you wanna say!

thank you 😔 my tummy has healed

his name is Eric and he's like genuinely, actually my oldest original character. i luv him very much

he was originally the older brother of my very first OC but that girl was scrapped for being boring af many years ago. i never let go of Eric, though, and he quickly became my absolute favorite

he is very kind, very compassionate, and among the sweetest characters i'll ever make. he's stupid pretty and wicked smart. he's the sort to make friends out of enemies without even trying.

he struggles with depression and will do so, so much for others in his quest to not let people down, to the point of self-neglect. ...i think i've always known that this is a manifestation of my own personal baggage 😂😂

i plan to make him a love interest in my second interactive fiction project! very excited to finally write him in full again. and like, properly fleshed out for the first time. so much nuance and depth to him 😭 i can't wait

i share a stupid number of coincidental, retrospective parallels with him. i realized this during the pandemic lol. i foisted a lot of concepts and things teen!me did not understand onto this character when i first wrote him... just to eventually look back at my own life and be like, 'holy shit, that's me' or 'holy shit, wait. i've done that.' i was 13 when i created him, so this still trips me out:

he is and has always been gay, even though i didn't have any grasp of what being LGBTQ+ is like outside of the facts that gay men and lesbians exist and people hate them for no good reason. that 'them' now very much includes me 😂 and all my friends lol

he is and has always been a sex worker, even though i did not have a proper understanding of sex work and how/when it differs from trafficking at ALL at that age. i wish i could say i barely understood sex either, but i'm p sure i had a porn addiction in hs, so no Fast forward to me at Eric's original age (19/early 20s) and I was, you guessed it, doing sex work.

i had a deeply problematic and frankly embarrassing portrayal of an abusive relationship with his older boyfriend/pimp as an integral part of his story. and... it turns out the ""friendship"" i had with the old guy who was finding me clients at one point was a lot less of a "friendship" and way more of an exploitative, possessive pimping situ sold to me as a partnership. like, honestly--i can't even begin to compare these dudes, the fictional bf and this real-life mf i knew, because the parallels between them, and even me and Eric during that time, are so many. you'd think i could have taken a step back and been like, 'oh shit. this is actually really similar to some of the more toxic elements of the abusive relationship i've been writing for literal years now' but. y'know what they about hindsight

i play every single interactive fiction game i touch as Eric, first and foremost. every. one.

consequently, i (and everyone else once that second project starts) have the choice of games title Drag Star to thank for the epiphany that Eric obviously had to be a drag queen. it just fit. I could picture him in every scene with such vividness that i just knew it was right. like a missing puzzle piece. ..........and hilariously enough, this was about 2 years after i got really, REALLY into make-up and drag. so that was like... the opposite of what usually happens with those parallels lol

i've been playing dress-up games since there was only ONE website for it 😂 so now i'm very, very happy that i get to rediscover my love for those silly things with the perfect excuse: drag looks for my favorite precious baby OC, Eric 🥰

i think that's prob more than enough, thank you so much for indulging me, anons!

#look an anon #er stuff #hotmess #just me gushing about a fictional man nothin to see here move along #ask me

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