Halloween is the holiday of literary nerds. It is the time of year when literature students gather and debate which is the scariest Edgar Allan Poe story, and if Dracula is really about vampires or just an extended metaphor for fear of women and foreigners.
At least, that’s how my friends and I celebrated.
While Poe’s stories like The Tell-Tale Heart and Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hallow are considered classic Halloween fare, not all of the scariest stories involve ghosts or otherworldly creatures. Sometimes the most frightening stories are about unexplained revenge, like Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado, or even Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, which explores a world where books are banned. The horror, the horror!
What are your favorite scary stories? Are your favorites of the Stephen King variety? Or do they frighten in more atypical ways, like Sauron in The Lord of the Rings? Tell us in the comments.
Featured Responses:
The Shadow from Ursula Le Guin's "A Wizard of Earthsea", formless, otherworldly, menacing and completely unescapable (I vaguely realized that it was more of a part of the man than a creature) was a great lasting fear to me in my childhood. I think, the scene of it coming into world had been the single piece of literature I was afraid to read again.
Color from the Sky, short story by H.P. Lovecraft--read it, you'll neve go out to the country again.
Pig Thing by Adam Nevill. The underlying tension of children in a remote house who don't know what happened to their parents.
"Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" by Joyce Carol Oates is definitely a contender for the scariest short story I've read. Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find" would be another one. Anything that could conceivably happen in real life has always frightened me more than tales of supernatural horror.