{"id":272,"date":"2008-10-31T08:10:00","date_gmt":"2008-10-31T08:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rbicmsblog.reedbusiness.com\/elogic_660000266\/2008\/10\/31\/what-books-scared-you\/"},"modified":"2008-10-31T08:10:00","modified_gmt":"2008-10-31T08:10:00","slug":"what-books-scared-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=272","title":{"rendered":"What Books Scared You?"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I was a child I was easily frightened by things that went bump in the night. Ghost stories filled me with panic. Horror movies were completely out of the question. When I was 8 years old I watched the movie Poltergeist<\/a><\/em> on television, in broad daylight, at my best friend Anne Yackee’s house, with my fingers stuck in my ears and my eyes squinting at the television screen. My mother heaved a sigh of relief when she finally calmed me down enough to get me into bed that night, but was awoken a short time later by my literally screaming in my sleep. This was around the same time that my father attempted to take me to see Ghostbusters<\/a><\/em> on the big screen and I was so freaked out by the first few scenes that I crawled onto the floor and cried until he took me home.<\/p>\n

My friend Anne, meanwhile, suffered none of these same terrors. In the constant back and forth between our neighboring houses, we spent a lot of time admiring and\/or reading one anothers’ books, which in her case included such titles as IT<\/a><\/em> by Stephen King and The Amityville Horror<\/a><\/em> by Jay Anson. Curious and determined to overcome my scaredy-cat status, I recall reading about 5 pages of IT<\/em> on one occasion, and several short sections of The Amityville Horror<\/em> on another. Those few minutes with each book seem to have etched permanent images into my brain, as I can still vividly recall the content of those pages.<\/p>\n

When it came to gore and horror I was (and sometimes think I still am) a complete wuss. But if you removed most of the references to blood and guts and gave me a spooky thriller, I was in seventh heaven. I read all of John Bellairs<\/a>‘s books and throughly enjoyed their spine-tingling thrills. Each book found its hapless child victim (Johnny Dixon or Lewis Barnavelt or Anthony Monday or Rose Rita) at the mercy of some blackly magical doings, but they were decidedly more suspense than gore, more mystery than horror. THESE were books that scared me in a way that I actually enjoyed.<\/p>\n

Halloween often makes me think about my childhood experiences with scary stories — both those I liked AND those I didn’t. What about you? What books or tales did you LOVE to be scared by, and which were just too Halloween<\/a><\/em>-like to handle?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was a child I was easily frightened by things that went bump in the night. Ghost stories filled me with panic. Horror movies were completely out of the question. When I was 8 years old I watched the movie Poltergeist on television, in broad daylight, at my best friend Anne Yackee’s house, with my fingers stuck in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}