Why I Love to be Scared or My Top Ten Creepy Scary Freaky Stories

Happy Book Review Tuesday!  For those of you reading daily, I promise there will be more of The Freebie, but not until Thursday.  For today, well, tradition is tradition – BRT it is, and therefore book review/recommendations there must be!  And tomorrow I have an excellent guest post lined up.  So you shall have to wait, eager reader…  Patience is, after all, a virtue.  And just because I don’t happen to possess that particular virtue doesn’t mean I don’t recognize its value.  😉

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Okay, I am going to admit something that makes no sense at all, even to me – I love creepy scary freaky stories, but hate creepy scary freaky movies, places, or events. I don’t understand this in the slightest bit. It makes no sense. My imagination is a much more vivid place than that of most, and when I read anything even remotely compelling I get completely sucked into the story. Yet I can read horrific, blood-thirsty, violence-laden, eerie, keep-you-up-all-night stories – and enjoy them quite a lot – but can’t watch movies that fall within even the margins of the horror genre without ending up with nightmares.

How weird am I?

I don’t know if it’s because when I visualize things in my mind I can put parameters around them – I can set enough boundaries, establish enough walls, build enough layers of protection in to make even my ’fraidy-cat self feel safe. Maybe I have a weak stomach for the in-your-face graphics of television and movies, and even if my mind pictures them in full-on graphic detail, that visualization is not as immediate as the graphics on the screen. Maybe it’s because I’m weird. (I tend to vote for the last one.)

Regardless, it is a fact that I do not love to be in-my-face confronted with gross, graphic, scary, horrifying, terrifying, eerie things to look at. And it’s not just movies/TV. I don’t particularly like haunted houses or being scared in real life either. I would like to think I am brave and would rise to the occasion ala my favorite heroines, but I am quite convinced that, no matter how much I like the stories, if I ever found myself in some bizzarro world with vampires biting necks or werewolves eating people or creepy demonic presences that I would freeze and cry like a little girl…

All of that aside, I do occasionally quite love to sit down with a good old-fashioned scary book and freak myself out. You know the kind of story I mean – one with clearly delineated powers of good and evil, horrid villainous Big Bads and fabulously heroic good guys who defy all odds to save the day, and the ability to keep you awake with all the lights on for weeks after you finish reading… Well, here are my top ten of those – the books that I couldn’t read at night, no matter how good the story was; the ones that gave me nightmares for a long time after the story ended.

So get ready, hunker down, make sure all the light bulbs are fresh and new (seriously – is there anything creepier than a light going out while you’re reading something truly scary?), cuddle into your favorite reading spot, and get ready to jump at every shadow and sound… But most of all, enjoy them!

Top 10 Creepy Scary Freaky Stories Guaranteed to Keep You Awake (or at Least Give You Bizarre Dreams)

1. The Shining – Stephen King
2. Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders – Vincent Bugliosi
3. Neverwhere – Neil Gaiman
4. The Cabinet of Curiosities – Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child
5. Lisey’s Story – Stephen King
6. Something Wicked This Way Comes – Ray Bradbury
7. The Passage – Justin Cronin
8. In the Woods – Tana French
9. In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
10. The Picture Of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde