TC Terror: Tattered Cover Staff's Favorite Scary Reads (Part 6)

Miki's Picks:


Guilty Pleasures by Laurel K. Hamilton
 Spooky and sexy and the first book in a great series.

Perfume by Patrick Suskind

A freaky serial killer with no sense of right or wrong, only desire.

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

Chilling because it has so much fact mixed with fiction the line between what is and what could be is very thin.






Molly's Pick:

Lisey's Story by Stephen King








K. B.'s Pick:

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

TC Terror: Tattered Cover Staff's Favorite Scary Stories (Part Four)

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
I think The Metamorphosis is pretty freaky.

--Katie S.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson 

The atmosphere is creepy and disconcerting and tinged with dark wonder. The protagonist's weird point of view makes the seeming mundane urban reality around her shaky and untenable. Is she really a witch or just a disturbed girl in the throes of teenaged angst? Full of haunting lovely language and images. One vivid scene where she creates her own homegrown spell by breathing a name into a glass of tap water and then drinking it
down, will always stick with me.

--Andrea P

***Sarah H is a fan too!

 Ghosts I Have Been by Richard Peck
I'm a wimp, so my scary book is really mild.

Blossom Culp is about 10 or 11 years old in an early 1900s Midwest small town. She meets a little boy who drowned on the Titanic. She and her mother (a psychic) barely scrape by, living on the "wrong side of the tracks". The only other person who can see the boy is Alexander, the boy from a well-off family who lives in the house on the hill.

-- Mindy

TC Terror: Tattered Cover Staff's Favorite Scary Stories (Part 3)

Faerie Tale by Raymond Feist

The epic military fantasy writer really shakes off that genre when he tells the tale of the Hastings family.  I remember looking for fairy stones afterward just to make sure nothing was lingering around my house in the woods.

Don't Breathe a Word by Jennifer McMahon

I use the phrase "scary fairy book with no fairies" when I describe this book to customers.  McMahon offers her read a fairly mundane explanation to the meat of the book, but then blows it all up in the reader's face right at the end.

 World War Z by Max Brooks
Taking a cliche subject and making it normal isn't the only thing Brooks does right in this oral history novel.  The characters and their "realness" get into your head so easily that every bump in your house becomes a zombie.  Don't read if you live in a bumpy house.

 Mister B. Gone by Clive Barker

The audio version of this book is narrated by Doug Bradley.  Not familiar?  He is Pinhead from The Hellraiser films.  A sort of light and gravelly voice fit to read horror novels.  The first person narrator is Mister B, a demon trapped within the book.  The story becomes an almost pleasant history, but all the while, Mister B is becoming more upset that the reader isn't burning the book (the first thing he asked the reader to do, not to read).

So why did this scare me?  At the end of disc five, Mister B was telling me that he was behind me and was going to cut my throat.  It was pretty violent.  But then he paused, and the disc ended.  I switched it with the sixth disc, and Mister B said, "I'm behind you."  And my car's disc player was suddenly unable to read the disc and ejected it.  I pulled over and looked behind me.  No fictional (?) minor devil.  Then I looked at
the disc.  No scratches.  I opted to listen to NPR for the rest of my drive.


--April