TheIronSheik
SUPER ELITE UPPER TIER
I've never been much of a reader. Bad ADHD made reading impossible for me as a young person. I started taking meds in my late 20's and it opened up a whole new world to me with books. But because I had never really read before, I am an extremely slow reader. Like, painfully slow. And even when I did start to read, I was more interested in non fiction books. Fiction just didn't really seem that interesting to me. Not knocking it, but just wasn't my cup of tea.
This past Christmas, I bought my daughter 2 books as stocking stuffers. We had watched The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix, so I thought it would be cool to get her that book. And then on top of it, I decided to get her The Shining because I had always heard that people loved the book. I personally thought the movie was bad, but a good friend in HS had always tried to convince me to read the book because the book was so much better than the movie. But, alas, I didn't read, so... there was that.
Oddly, even though I hated to read, I loved to write. I had always dreamed of writing a novel, as I'm sure a good portion of Americans had too. While that dream has faded, I was still fascinated as to how a book could be "scary." So while on vacation, I decided to read Hill House. The novel that invented the scary, haunted genre, apparently. It was terrible. I honestly thought the writing was terrible, hard to follow and worst of all, not scary at all. So I moved on to The Shining. While I really liked this book, I didn't really think of it as scary. I would say more tense. But it wasn't like the ghosts were very scary. And I had a hard time taking the hedge animals coming to life as very scary. Again, not knocking the book, because I really liked it. But not scary.
I did a search on Google to see what books are considered the scariest books of all time and almost every returned result listed these two book. (Funny side note, The Shining actually mentions Hill House in it.) But after that, there's no real good list of scary books. I'm not looking for The Grapes of Wrath or Great Expectations. It doesn't have to be a masterpiece. I'm just wanting to read a book that people find scary. To see how they convey that sense of terror and fear.
Anybody here have any recommendations to books that might have scared them? And I'm not looking for a book that was scary because of a murderer or something like that. I'm looking for a good ghost story. Something supernatural.
What say you, FFA?
This past Christmas, I bought my daughter 2 books as stocking stuffers. We had watched The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix, so I thought it would be cool to get her that book. And then on top of it, I decided to get her The Shining because I had always heard that people loved the book. I personally thought the movie was bad, but a good friend in HS had always tried to convince me to read the book because the book was so much better than the movie. But, alas, I didn't read, so... there was that.
Oddly, even though I hated to read, I loved to write. I had always dreamed of writing a novel, as I'm sure a good portion of Americans had too. While that dream has faded, I was still fascinated as to how a book could be "scary." So while on vacation, I decided to read Hill House. The novel that invented the scary, haunted genre, apparently. It was terrible. I honestly thought the writing was terrible, hard to follow and worst of all, not scary at all. So I moved on to The Shining. While I really liked this book, I didn't really think of it as scary. I would say more tense. But it wasn't like the ghosts were very scary. And I had a hard time taking the hedge animals coming to life as very scary. Again, not knocking the book, because I really liked it. But not scary.
I did a search on Google to see what books are considered the scariest books of all time and almost every returned result listed these two book. (Funny side note, The Shining actually mentions Hill House in it.) But after that, there's no real good list of scary books. I'm not looking for The Grapes of Wrath or Great Expectations. It doesn't have to be a masterpiece. I'm just wanting to read a book that people find scary. To see how they convey that sense of terror and fear.
Anybody here have any recommendations to books that might have scared them? And I'm not looking for a book that was scary because of a murderer or something like that. I'm looking for a good ghost story. Something supernatural.
What say you, FFA?
