Whats the first book that seriously scared you?
 

For me it was the Omen. Salems Lot did it for my husband.

#2 pencil's book burning thread triggered this memory.

Pet Sematary.

I don't generally ready scary books. I ready a Stephen King short story collection, and there were a couple scary stories in that. One about a kid having to take care of some old lady relative who was a witch.

I don't remember. But I do remember being seriously creeped out by the evilness in Lord of the Rings. Tolkien was so good at making the bad seem Bad.

The first one I can remember the title for is Stranger With my Face - Lois Duncan (who also wrote I know What You Did Last Summer which I also read). I was 12. There's a part where she looks in the mirror and it's not her face looking back (I think her reflection is smiling) and it terrified me.

Prior to that was a book called something like The House of the Four Winds, but not the one I can see on Amazon. I asked my Mum, "What does severed mean?" and when Mum asked the context replied something like, "Looked up to see the blood dripping from a newly severed head" she took the book away from me. I got it back in the end, but the part that scared me wasn't the decapitation, it was the malevolent servants and the secret twin.

As a teen, The Shining terrified me. I've always been more scared by the dark inside houses rather than outside. The Shining scared me so much I held it away from me to turn the pages because I was physically scared of the book. Fantastic.

ETA (after reading Cloud) LOTR did scare me - but it was a good scariness. Fog on the Barrow Downs was wonderfully creepy.

Stephen Kings books never really scared me, just like a lot of horror movies dont - even though Alien freaked me out to no end.

Lasher Part of a series of Anne Rice books. Not really that scary, but living alone in an old apartment, drinking beer and reading all night did the trick.

I love scary books and movies but I can't think of any that physically scared me, especially not those which are quite impossible to be true (hauntings, etc.) I do remember being thrilled with books that grabbed me in a suspenseful way: I knew it was just a book but I could be gripped by the intensity and the mystery. One that comes to mind from my childhood is Mystery of the Witches Bridge.

Well, I was dating a crazy wiccan bitch* at the time and there was a lot of weird stuff happening... and and and, i'm a wuss.

Not saying there is any connection between those words other than the person they describe. she was wiccan. she was batshit crazy. she was a bitch. she was great in bed so those things were temporarily acceptable.

As a little kid I was really scared by the book-form of Alien the movie. Somewhere in the book, maybe as a teaser on the first page or maybe on the back book cover, was a graphic description of how the alien layed an egg in the guy's stomach. It scared me so much that I never read the book, even though I checked it out of the school library at least twice.

First book otherwise that really gave me a chill was The Hot Zone, by Preston. The idea of an outbreak of ebola is very scary.

The Exorcist when I was about 13 or 14. I was afraid to go to the basement after dark for about six months.

The Talisman kept me up for awhile when I read it in the fifth grade, but now I don't really remember anything scary about that book.

Are you sure it wasn't The Penisman? That might keep you up for awhile in fifth grade even if it wasn't scary.

hmmm, hard to say.

Wow - either I read it years after it was published or you are a lot younger than I thought.