It’s time for our monthly group post, where we share thoughts, experiences, books we’ve read, favorite Maine places, and more. This month, for Halloween, the topic is: The Book that Scared You as a Child.
Kate Flora: When we were brainstorming about this what this month’s topic should be, and landed on this one, I couldn’t think of a single book that fit. Then, a few minutes later, mine popped into my head. It’s a story most people wouldn’t find scary at all, and yet it gave me nightmares for years. The story? Aladdin. It left me with vivid dreams of everyone saying “Goodbye” and sealing me up in a cave. Weird? Yes. But I had that dream for years. I guess you never know what’s going to be the thing that lingers. Now I’m curious about what my blog fellows will share.
Maureen Milliken: Whenever this topic comes up, my answer is immediate. The book that scared the hell out of me as a kid was “The Mystery of the Crimson Ghost,” by Phyllis A. Whitney.
The scary part revolves around a ghost-dog wailing in the night. I’m not sure why it scared me so much, because by then, I’m going to guess I was around 10 or 11, I was reading plenty of mysteries and horror without any adverse effects, but even seeing the cover now gives me a chill. I guess it’s the combination of something frightening and unexplained up against the need to do what’s right and vulnerability? The heroine was trying to save an abused horse owned by scary crazy person on a neighboring farm. The ghost must’ve been written in a way that made it terrible and inexplicable. I don’t even remember and I still can’t say. I do remember the feeling it gave me. As kids, we had a habit of reading out loud to each other. I’m not sure how this happened in our otherwise unruly and cranky group, but we did up into the early teen years of us older kids, when it faded away. Anyway, I have a vivid memory of being in an upstairs room on a summer night with the window open and hearing my brother, on the patio below, reading the book to our younger siblings. I’d already read it, and I knew what the resolution was, and I still had to shut the window.
The only thing that compares is a few years later, when I was 14, and inexplicably home alone on a chilly, dark fall day. For hours, I read “In Cold Blood,” by Truman Capote. Our dog kept barking for no reason and I several times got up to look out the windows and make sure there were no mass murderers lurking out there. I even locked the doors, which we never did at our house in Augusta, since there were so many of us coming in and out at all hours (including the occasional stranger, a post for another day). It’s one of the few times in my life that I remember being happy when people returned home and I was no longer alone in the house. Boo!
Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson: I don’t remember being scared by any book when I was a child (movies, yes–the cyclops in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad had me looking over my shoulder for weeks after I saw that one.) but I do know what book terrified me most as an adult. That was Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, with his Salem’s Lot as a close runner-up. Much as I admire him as a writer, I’ve never read another of his books except for the On Writing. He’s just too darned good at evoking terror. This was the novel, by the way, that King said scared even him and I believe it. As an aside, years later, an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer made use of the same, shall we say unsettling possibility, but in televised form I found it much less upsetting. Go figure.
Matt Cost: The pig scene. The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson. I was 12, home alone, reading this book, when… well, let’s set the scene… I grew up in a tiny hamlet called East Madison, Maine. We, much like Ka
te Flora, had a hundred acres of fields and woods, and our house was set a quarter-mile from the road, a driveway that was only passable on foot in the winter. We had wood stove heat only. The only running water was cold. And the house was built by my father, who’d never even built a birdhouse before. In the chill of the winter, the wind whipping the zero-degree temperature into minus digits, I was reading this fine book by myself, huddled on the couch, probably because I was too lazy to add a log to the fire, when I came to the part where the large demonic pig, Jodie, is seen outside the house, looking in with large glowing red eyes. I will swear to this day that I looked up at that point, across at the window, and saw those two large glowing eyes staring at me. I’m not sure if I ever finished the book, as I blacked out most of the next two years of my life in sheer terror that Jodie was hunting me.
Kait Carson: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. I don’t remember how old I was when I read the book, but it terrified me. I grew up in Rutherford, New Jersey, home of the then main campus of Fairleigh Dickinson University, and Iviswold Castle. Built in 1869, the Castle, as we called it, was originally known as Hill House. Despite the subsequent name change, and despite the building’s use as classroom space and administrative offices, the legend stuck. Generations of Rutherford kids dared each other to sneak into the ‘dungeon’ where all manner of horror, and certain death, awaited.
Rob Kelley: I couldn’t tell you the title or author of the book, but my family had a book on nature whose cover included a monstrously large drawing of what was probably a Rainbow Scarab Beetle. I would hide the book in the cabinet below the book case so that I didn’t have to look at it. As for a book whose story scared me, I’ll second Pet Sematary, which I read as a teenager. I don’t think I lost sleep over it, but I definitely remember wondering if I could bear to keep reading (I did!).
