Why Aren't (More) Books "Scary?"

What do we mean when we say a book is scary? Plus, the only two books that ever terrified me.

I have been on a quest to find terrifying books. This is a surprisingly difficult feat. There are countless Reddit posts on r/horror beseeching suggestions for truly “scary” books, and fellow genre fans are more than willing to accommodate. Common suggestions include House of Leaves, The Exorcist, The Haunting of Hill House, Dracula, and many more.

You can check out this breakdown of the 20 most-cited “scary” books for a comprehensive list.

I’ve read most of these books. And while (almost) all of them are well-written, I don’t find any of them scary. I’m not the only one, either. For every comment citing a book that’s terrifying, there’s one or more replies saying it’s not.

There’s one thing that my own experience–and the anecdotal agreement of other readers of the horror genre–have taught me: truly “scary” books are hard to come by. Like, almost impossibly hard.

So what’s with all the lists of “scary” books that people swear scared them senseless? I think it comes down to three things: subjectivity, semantics, and level of immersion.

The first thing, subjectivity, I won’t belabor too much. It just means that we all find different things scary. What terrifies me might be yawn-worthy to you, or even downright silly.

The next thing, semantics, refers to what we mean when we say a book is “scary.” I personally think there are three types of horror: disgust, dread, and terror.

The Semantics of Horror

Disgust is exactly what it sounds like. Stephen King’s proverbial gross-out, the body horror that makes you squirm. Gross or disturbing things for the sake of being gross and disturbing. Disgust is my least-favorite type of horror. With a few notable exceptions, I think it’s often used for shock value without delving into deeper narrative issues or societal themes. But to each their own–I won’t yuck anyone else’s yums.

(Unless you like Human Centipede. Shame! Shame! Shame!)

Dread is the most common type of horror, especially in literature. It’s bleak. Dread is like a pit in your stomach. It can even keep you up at night. Still, you’re not really afraid in the moment. The horror is more a “what if” type of feeling. That brings us to our final type of horror:

Terror gets your heartrate up and has you checking the dark corners of your room for shadowy figures. You may feel petrified, like it’s difficult to move. Maybe you don’t even believe in the supernatural… but what if it does exist? For a brief time your nervous system is tricked into thinking the danger is real.

Stephen King has a similar hierarchy for scares, though he labels them slightly differently¹:

“The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there...”

One reason that there’s such a dichotomy of what people find scary is that when some people—myself included—ask for a scary book what they really mean is that they want a terrifying book. Others reply with books–good, scary books, mind–that filled them with dread. But they’re not terrifying. So there’s a bit of miscommunication going on here.

Terror is hard to pull off in book form. In fact, there are only two books that I remember actually terrifying me as an adult. (As a kid it was a different story. Wait Till Helen Comes had me sleeping with the lights on for at least a week, and nothing’s scarier than those vintage “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” illustrations. I’m sure there were more than these two) The most effective was Stolen Tongues by Felix Blackwell. This book actually made it difficult for me to sleep. The second book was Incidents Around the House by Josh Malerman, which, while not really scaring me later that night, did have several moments in the narrative that made my blood run cold. Like, truly freaky stuff.

So why do these two particular books work? It’s interesting to note that Stolen Tongues was actually adapted from a Reddit post on r/NoSleep. This tracks. It’s much easier to write a terrifying story when it’s short. It’s also notable that Stolen Tongues was only really terrifying in the first couple chapters - it’s hard to maintain terror for that long.² The quality also dips after a certain point, obvious that the author had to stretch and pad to make a full-length work.³

Incidents Around the House manages to remain cohesive throughout, as well as pepper in the terrifying moments. One description that sticks with me actually happened near the end of the book. Despite an overall message of the book that I’m not okay with and I don’t think the author really thought through (you can DM me if you’ve read the book and want to hash it out), I was impressed with how cohesive and scary it managed to be. I think the reason for this is the style Malerman chose to write in. The book is written from the close POV of a very small child. There aren’t even any quotation marks used for dialogue, which sounds annoying–and kind of was–but somehow worked? Part of it is that we’re terrified for the kid (cheap trick or masterful use of human psychology?), but also the kid doesn’t really clock things that adults would, so you think one thing’s happening and then SUDDENLY OH MY GOD WHAT THE HECK. And the simplistic language makes things more immediate where a more typical rich description creates a layer of linguistic cushion that makes the scares less effective.

Can you tell that I’m more impressed by Incidents Around the House than Stolen Tongues? I’m still parsing what makes it so effective because I hope to recreate it in my own writing.

The last thing, and probably the biggest reason there are fewer terrifying books, is the higher barrier for immersion.

Why it’s hard to be terrified by a book

There are far more terrifying movies than terrifying books. This is just a fact. But why is that?

It’s because there’s a higher barrier to total immersion with books. For one thing, reading requires more concentration. You can zone out of a movie for a few seconds without losing the plot–not to mention that the movie continues playing whether you're paying attention or not.

You don’t have that luxury with a book. You lose your place, you reread the same paragraph ten times and don’t absorb any of it. And if you stop reading, the book stops. It takes effort to read a book, while a movie takes effort to stop playing because you have to click a button.

A book also requires more filtering through the mind of the reader. A movie presents you directly with images and sounds. These images and sounds are going to stay the same no matter how you’re feeling. A book, on the other hand, requires you to read words and then convert those words into images and sounds. This means the experience of a book is heavily affected by the mindset of the reader. If you're distracted or tired it's not going to be as sharply rendered, and therefore less effective.

This is where I admit that I may just be the problem, as usual. I usually only get to read at night. It's the last thing I do before I sleep. Sometimes I'm bone tired but I still want to make progress, so I try to get a few percentage points in.

It can be hard to concentrate. I'm currently reading Last Days by Adam Neville, which is one of the books that's often cited as being “scary.” (It's also one of the ones that people say isn't scary, so ymmv.) And… I can see how it might give me the type of chills I got from Incidents Around the House and Stolen Tongues if I were less tired lately.

Am I going to stop reading-while-distracted? Heck no, because then I wouldn’t be reading at all and that’s just unacceptable.

Books: Not the best delivery system for thrilling chills

There's also the fact that the medium of words on the page simply isn’t the best delivery system for terror. It’s almost impossible to deliver an effective jump scare in a book. The sentences tell on themselves, giving you a little glimpse, a chance to brace before impact. The time it takes to read the words, however miniscule, slows the scare down and dulls it.

(I think there are ways to make writing feel more like jump scares. Incidents Around the House did this very well. I plan to do a follow-up post about what makes a book actually terrifying. I do think short sentences and limited descriptions help. The less to get in the way, the better. That’s all to say this isn’t the last you’ll hear from me on the subject of making books scary!)

Another trick commonly used in horror movies that’s nearly impossible to do in a book is something happening in the background unnoticed by the character. Think the clown mannequins changing position in the background of Hell House LLC Origins: Carmichael Manor, or Baghead stepping into frame behind Liv Tyler in The Strangers. Think, even, of how Mike Flanagan hides plot-irrelevant ghosts in the background of The Haunting of Hill House.

It’s been seventeen years since I saw this movie in the theater, and I still remember this moment. The audience reaction was priceless, including a person who didn’t see ol’ Baghead until ten seconds after everyone else and yelled “Jesus Christ, he’s there!”

This type of scare is the bread and butter of some of the scariest movies. It’s almost impossible to pull this off in a book, because in typing the words out you are drawing attention to it, and in doing so it loses some of its creepy edge. Not to mention that describing something going on in the background would likely break the narrative’s POV, unless you were doing something experimental in the first place.

So, there’s my treatise on scary books and why it’s so hard to find them! Look out for my upcoming article on what makes a book scary. I plan to write it after I continue my quest to find scary books. Speaking of which, do you have a scary book to recommend? Whether it’s disgusting, dreadful, or terrifying, I want to hear about it, so let me know in the comments!

H. H. Duke is a writer, author, and podcaster. Most importantly, she loves horror! Currently, she’s working on a book about a weird cave. OoooOOoo! For scary book recommendations, horror movie reviews, and other spooky things, subscribe to H. is for Horror now - If you dare!

You’ll Also Like

Loved the VVitch? Read These 6 Books

Did Shirley Jackson Shyamalan Herself?

The September House: Horror Thoughts

Carmichael Manor: 2023’s Scariest Movie?

1. I actually think horror is a better term than dread for what I mean, but since the name of the genre itself is horror, I decided to use dread for clarity’s sake.

2. Note: I do not expect a book to maintain terror throughout to be considered terrifying. Much like with movies, it’s important to have breaks in-between the scary moments, otherwise the viewer will get burnt out. I’m particularly impressed if a book is able to have terrifying moments sprinkled throughout the text.

3. There’s also an ill-conceived author’s note at the end where he tries to defend his cultural appropriation of indigenous lore. It’s weird and honestly difficult to describe. I just remember it giving me the ick when I read it.