Review by New York Times Review
Authors recommend the books that caused them to lose sleep at night. The scariest book I've ever read is the haunting of hill house, by Shirley Jackson. I read it one night next to my sleeping wife and found myself unable to move, unable to go to bed, unable to do anything except keep reading and praying the shadows around me didn't move. - CARMEN MARIA MACHADO, author of "Her Body and Other Parties" I never really recovered from the collector, by John Fowles, a work of shattering brilliance and unbearable suspense - as well as the clear inspiration for "The Silence of the Lambs." "The Collector" presents the reader with a pair of unforgettable adversaries, locked in a desperate yet restrained struggle: Frederick Clegg, the introverted kidnapper, and Miranda Grey, his prisoner. Writing before the F.B.I. created its criminal profiling unit - before the term "serial killer" had even been coined - Fowles was there, methodically exploring the reasoning of humanity's most terrifying predators. - JOE HILL, author of "Strange Weather" I remember it - 13 years old, in the suburban security of a life I took for granted, oliver twist snatched all of that away, when the boy was stripped of everything and left alone. I agonized over questions I never agonized over before. What if everyone died, leaving me alone? Adults were selfish and brutal, and in the case of Bill Sikes, evil incarnate. Sikes scared me right down to the bone and still haunts my dreams. I got goose bumps just typing this. - MARLON JAMES, author of "A Brief History of Seven Killings" The books that have profoundly scared me when I read them - made me want to sleep with the light on, made the neck hairs prickle and the goose bumps march, are few: Henry James's "The Ttirn of the Screw," Peter Straub's "Ghost Story," Stephen King's "It" and "'Salem's Lot" and "The Shining" all scared me silly, and transformed the night into a most dangerous place. But Shirley Jackson's the haunting of hill house beats them all: a maleficent house, real human protagonists, everything half-seen or happening in the dark. It scared me as a teenager and it haunts me still, as does Eleanor, the girl who comes to stay. - NEIL GAIMAN, author of "Norse Mythology" PET SEMATARY, by Stephen King. I got it as a gift when I was 11 or 12.1 remember being so scared reading it that I threw the book away from me as if it were a poisonous insect. For the first time I felt a physical sensation with literature. It's so dark, so brutal. It's also very scary: the utter hopelessness, the way King just doesn't offer any relief. - MARIANA ENRIQUEZ, author of "Things We Lost in the Fire" In the fall of 2001,1 was working by myself on a weekend afternoon at a mystery bookstore in Greenwich Village. Traffic was slow and I had some downtime to read Sara Gran's come closer, which one of the bookstore's co-owners recommended highly. I generally shy away from horror - gore on film doesn't do it for me, and my imagination runs wild with the print versions - but once I began Gran's novel, about a young woman named Amanda who begins to behave in strange, inexplicable ways, I could not stop until I reached the very last line: "And that's all I've ever wanted, really: someone to love me, and never leave me alone." A common wish transformed into monstrous deed made me shiver in fear, a feeling that persisted until the end of my store shift, and in the years thereafter. - SARAH WEINMAN, author of "The Real Lolita" The scariest book I've read in a long time is A REAPER AT the games, by Sabaa Tahir. Though it has terrifying, fantastical monsters (picture the kind of face that would earn the name "Nightbringer"), the scariest part of this book for me comes in a hauntingly visceral portrayal of domestic abuse. Some scenes were so terrifying and hard to read I became physically nauseated! - TOMI ADEYEMI, author of "Children of Blood and Bone" Possibly the scariest book I've ever read was Richard Preston's nonfiction thriller the hot zone, about outbreaks of the Ebola virus and the efforts to identify and contain that sort of hemorrhagic fever. I like Stephen King's comment that he read "The Hot Zone" between his splayed fingers. There are times when the simple listing of factual events can be more frightening than even the best works of imagination a novelist can concoct - although Shirley Jackson's classic "The Haunting of Hill House" comes in a very close second to "The Hot Zone" on my personal read-through-splayed-fingers list. - DAN SIMMONS, author of the forthcoming "Omega Canyon" The scariest book I've ever read is the autobiography of my mother, by Jamaica Kincaid. It's categorized as literary fiction, but it's a horror novel, too. It's narrated by a woman whose mother dies giving birth to her and death is the book's obsession. The book is bleak and venomous and yet it's written with such spare beauty. It's her masterpiece. - VICTOR LaVALLE, author of "The Changeling" The scariest book I've ever read is Octavia E. Butler's near-futuristic parable of the sower. Much of Butler's work is frightening because it feels so plausible and true, even when she's writing about aliens or vampires. But this book's dystopia of walled-off communities, useless government, unchecked violence and corporate slavery feels like the waiting headlines of tomorrow - and too many of our headlines today. When I first began reading it, I could take glimpses of the teenager Lauren Olamina's world only a few pages at a time. But Butler forced me to grow stronger as I read. Despite the horror of its prescience, the stubborn optimism that burns at the core of "Parable of the Sower" helps me face our truelife horrors. As Butler wrote, "The only lasting truth is Change." - TANANARIVE DUE, author of "My Soul to Keep" I came of age reading pulp fiction like Iceberg Slim and V. C. Andrews as well as true-crime books like "In Cold Blood." One summer when we were staying in a house in the country - I must have been 14 - I read helter skelter, by Vincent Bugliosi, and began my lifelong obsession with murderous cults. I developed terrible insomnia and lay awake with visions of Manson and his girls lurking behind the trees outside my window, waiting to get me - or maybe for me to join them. - DANZY SENNA, author of "New People" IN THE CUT, by Susanna Moore. I am not usually drawn to detective or murder mysteries, and am ambivalent about books that hinge on erotics and violence against women. But this is such a deft and smart book. I gulped it down in my dorm room after teaching in Vermont during the day and could not sleep for the rest of the night. - MARINA BUDHOS, author of "Watched" DEATH IN SPRING, by Merce Rodoreda, is a terrifying book for me both psychologically and metaphorically speaking, making any dystopian or scary novels written today seem like a quiet, tranquil stroll through America's most festive beachfronts. Her images were so highly ferocious and so controlled that any misguided readers could easily mistake her brilliance for arbitrary oversight or chaotic overintoxication or abuse of symbolism. I love how she uses language in a poetic fashion to penetrate the horrors of fascism and the horrors of survival or of wanting to survive in a debased system that abuses human basic need: to just be. - VIKHI NAO, author of "Sheep Machine"
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 2, 2018]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The first unabridged audio edition of the novel King considers his most frightening should be more than enough to lure the author's fans, and the fact that it's read by Hall, who played the eponymous serial killer on Showtime's Dexter (adapted from Jeff Lindsay's novels), will only add to the appeal. Hall effectively employs a full emotional range, starting with joyous. That's the dominant mood of Dr. Louis Creed as he and his family-wife Rachel, kids Ellie and Gage, and Ellie's cat, Church-arrive at their new home in Ludlow, Maine. Hall's narration quickly loses some of its cheeriness when young Ellie falls from a swing and bangs her knee and toddler Gage is stung by a bee. And, when their new neighbor, elderly Jud Crandall, leads them to a pet cemetery (with its misspelled sign) in the shadowy woods behind their home, the atmosphere grows distinctly chilly. The chill only increases when Church is killed by a car and Jud informs Louis-in an avuncular, Down East accent courtesy of Hall-that some animals placed in the Micmac Indian burial ground just beyond the cemetery have been resurrected. Louis and Jud bury Church there, and the cat does come back, but it's different, malodorous, and sullen. Eventually there are more burials and reanimations, resulting in ever-increasing grotesqueries, with the narration rising to a hackles-raising height of terror. The combination of King at his bloodiest and Hall at his most terrifying make this irresistible. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
This novel began as a reworking of W.W. Jacobs' horror classic ""The Monkey's Paw""--a short story about the dreadful outcome when a father wishes for his dead son's resurrection. And King's 400-page version reads, in fact, like a monstrously padded short story, moving so slowly that every plot-turn becomes lumberingly predictable. Still, readers with a taste for the morbid and ghoulish will find unlimited dark, mortality-obsessed atmosphere here--as Dr. Louis Creed arrives in Maine with wife Rachel and their two little kids Ellie and Gage, moving into a semi-rural house not far from the ""Pet Sematary"": a spot in the woods where local kids have been burying their pets for decades. Louis, 35, finds a great new friend/father-figure in elderly neighbor Jud Crandall; he begins work as director of the local university health-services. But Louis is oppressed by thoughts of death--especially after a dying student whispers something about the pet cemetery, then reappears in a dream (but is it a dream??) to lead Louis into those woods during the middle of the night. What is the secret of the Pet Sematary? Well, eventually old Jud gives Louis a lecture/tour of the Pet Sematary's ""annex""--an old Micmac burying ground where pets have been buried. . .and then reappeared alive! So, when little Ellie's beloved cat Church is run over (while Ellie's visiting grandfolks), Louis and Jud bury it in the annex--resulting in a faintly nasty resurrection: Church reappears, now with a foul smell and a creepy demeanor. But: what would happen if a human corpse were buried there? That's the question when Louis' little son Gage is promptly killed in an accident. Will grieving father Louis dig up his son's body from the normal graveyard and replant it in the Pet Sematary? What about the stories of a previous similar attempt--when dead Timmy Baterman was ""transformed into some sort of all-knowing daemon?"" Will Gage return to the living--but as ""a thing of evil?"" He will indeed, spouting obscenities and committing murder. . .before Louis must eliminate this child-demon he has unleashed. Filled out with overdone family melodrama (the feud between Louis and his father-in-law) and repetitious inner monologues: a broody horror tale that's strong on dark, depressing chills, weak on suspense or surprise--and not likely to please the fans of King's zestier, livelier terror-thons. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.