This might be the wrong place for this, as I am using this for something I'm writing, but I would like some help brainstorming. What books did you read as a kid would you not want to be dumped in the middle of? I'm looking for more recognizable classics if you i.e. treasure island.
I never liked the Tarzan type stories. I can't give you specific examples but jungles always scared the willies out of me when I was little... it's where the witch doctors hung out cursed people with their voodoo dolls. Yeah, I know now that witch doctors don't do voodoo but I was a kid and I didn't know nothing!
This same thread is on General Writing under 'childhood'. Perhaps it's better to just stick with that one.
It was called Taliepo and I'm not even sure if I spelled that right. Our librarian read it to us in first grade and it scared the ever living bejesus out of me!!!! Seriously! It was an old folk legend and I wouldn't sleep with my feet at the end of my bed (where the monster appears at the end) for two years solid!
There were books my best friend and I read called "Scary Stories" there were a few of them, and they freaked us out. They were always set out in the middle of nowhere, and since I lived smack in the middle of a bunch of corn fields, we would scare ourselves silly reading them. It was a bunch of short stories, and if I am not mistaken they still sell them.
Yes, I have read te Scary Stories books too. Part of the terror is the pictures, they look so gruesome and horrible. One of the worst ones is the one about the bride playing hide-and-seek with her family and hiding in a coffin and getting locked in there, and they find her dead hours later. Another story is this one that had this really great plot, but I can't remember the title; it was about a boy that was so scared of dying he had his soul put in a bottle, and because it was in the bottle his soul was being controlled by whoever had it, so when he went to sleep he was controlled without his knowledge to do horrible things. There was this one chapter where he was having a nightmare about being buried alive, which scared me so horribly. It didn't help that I was reading it in school, and some chick sitting across from me was wearing this awful cotton-candy perfume, which is the worst kind of perfume, and it smelled, at first sniff, sugary and awful, but the longer you kept smelling it, it dulled your nose, so it smelled like rotting body, which compared with the visual of being buried alive and rotting away in a coffin literally made me sick. I actually threw up from reading that, it was so horrible. And that was when I decided I wanted to be cremated. Yuck. Awful, awful, awful.
Another horrifying one has to be The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. It wasn't scary, but it made me so sick. What a horrible way to die.
As others stated, "Scary Stories" was one that scared me. I remember checking it out all the time when I was younger. "Ribbajack" was a good book, but I would never want to be in the middle of those stories. And I always got a scare from demons.
Rosie no-name and the forest of forgetting, by Gareth Owen. I liked the book, but it was kind of creepy.
I remember reading a book called Wacky Wednesday when I was younger. I think it's a Scholastic book? (I can't remember). It had illustrations, and one could tell none of it was intended to be horrific. But from my childhood point of view, I didn't think including some headless people in the drawings was my idea of funny. I had nightmares long after.
