Terror, A List of Those Few Special Scenes

I don’t think that horror is defined by fear. Atmosphere, yes, certainly, but there’s a difference between atmosphere and fear. For me, atmosphere is the creeping sensation that the story’s real, that it’s inescapable, that it’s all around you. It’s what makes you believe in everything the author says and swallow every loathsome idea whole and unexamined.

Pure terror, though, is something rarer. Anyone who loves to read is obviously changed to a greater or lesser degree by what they’re reading at the moment, but to have that change become the dominant portion of your existence, for words on a page to push the fight or flight reflex to such extremes that you’re ready to beg for your life, well, that takes talent. So no, I don’t think that terror is the point of horror, but I definitely do think that it’s evidence that the author’s doing something right.

This is a Halloween list of those few books that have managed to terrify me, that made me forgot all about it just being a book, that had me on the edge of my seat with one hand gripping a the armrest so hard that my knuckles were turning white, frantically wondering how I could flee the room before It got there. Most of these scenes are not the climaxes of their respective books. Sometimes, they’re almost a throwaway. Yet, without exception, they all scared the shit out of me. So let’s take a look.

Before do, though, a warning: the following has spoilers for all books discussed.


To some degree, I think we all fear being helpless, and I’m damn positive that Evenson was thinking of that when he wrote one of the opening scenes in the second novella of Last Days. Kline is grievously wounded and under guard at a hospital. It starts: “Mr. Kline,” said the voice. “We’re coming for you.” And then the line went dead. (p. 113) There is nowhere for Kline to go, no way for him to get there.

He wakes up as his guard is killed, and then the assassin is standing over his bed. What follows is a game of wits, with one player feigning sleep the entire time, the whole struggle between them one of stealth, with near certain death hanging over every action. Unpredictability is the name of the game, and careful plans are devised, enacted, and abandoned, all without the other party ever knowing about their conception:

Inverting the syringe, she tapped the air out.

Now, he thought, tensing slightly, she will bring the needle close so as to inject it into my arm. When she does, I’ll plunge the mirror’s stylus into her eye and will kill her did.

Only it didn’t work quite the way he imagined. Instead of coming close and injecting it into his arm, she simply injected it into his IV bag. (p. 116)

Gripping, original, and paralyzing in its strength; this is how you write a horror scene, as far as I’m concerned.


In my review I said that the hypnosis scenes were horrifying, but it’s hard to really understand just how much of a betrayal it is to watch your own vicariously inhabited and completely trusted body go insane, to watch it betray everything it holds dear:

Stop her, said the only voice left in the world, and as she lunged past him, Judge saw himself catch her hair in one first and snap her head back. She was wretched off her feet. Judge pivoted and threw her down. The furniture jumped when she hit the floor. A stack of CDs on an end table slid off and crashed ot the floor without a sound. Jude’s foot found her stomach, a good hard kick, and she jerked herself into a fetal position. The moment after he’d done it, he didn’t know why he’d done it.

There you go, said the dead man. (p. 114)

Powerful and painful, Hill’s writing leaves you feeling complicit in an act that never happened.

I first read 'Salem's Lot quite a few years ago, on a Sierra Club hiking trip with my family. We’d just gotten back from some six mile uphill monstrosity, and I sat down in the lodge to read. I opened my book, and the two boys within decided they were going to walk through the woods to get to their friends house. As they walked, the woods creaked secretively around them (p. 115), and I started to get a little on edge. A branch snapped somewhere behind them, almost stealthily. (p. 115) Alright, more than a litte. Another branch snapped off to their left. (p. 115) A lot more than a little. Another branch snapped. Well, wait, calm down, Nat, they’re just kids. Nothing bad’s going to happen to the kids, right? Not quite right, as it turns out:

“In just a minute we’ll see the streetlights and feel stupid but it will be good to feel stupid so cunt steps. One…two…three…”

Ralphie shrieked.

“I see it! I see the ghost! I SEE IT!” (p. 116)

I skipped the next day’s hike, in case you were wondering.

But why was the scene so scary? I’m not sure. On reread a few weeks ago, it was still powerful, but nowhere near as horrifying. I think that the excellence was in large part derived from my situation – being a kid of roughly comparable age to the protagonists, in the woods – but the scene is still perfectly developed. The reader, of course, knows that there’s evil afoot well before it takes place and sympathies far more with Ralphie’s whining than his older brother’s rationalism, but the way the atmosphere gradually builds as branches snap, the way that (even at the end) the older boy is convinced they’re at least being hunted by a human foe, the way the scene climaxes in disorientation and uncertainty, it’s all great writing and Stephen King at his chilling best.


This is the first book that I read that scared me, actually. I’d read Cell before hand, and Needful Things, but both were more entertaining than upsetting. This one, on the other hand, dripped atmosphere. We’re a third of the way through, here, and Danny’s investigating Room 217. He goes into the bathroom, and sees the expected corpse in the tub. Well, duh. It’s a horror novel, after all. The woman was sitting up. (p. 326) Oh shit, that wasn’t supposed to happen. Danny runs, reaches the door, but The door would not open, would not, would not, would not. (p. 328) Shit. Double shit. But it’s okay, because Danny figures out how to get clear, so it’s all gonna be fine:

His eyelids snapped down. His hands curled into balls. His shoulders hunched with the effort of his concentration:

(Nothing there nothing there not there at all NOTHING THERE THERE IS NOTHING!)

Time passed. And he was just beginning to relax, just beginning to realize that the door must be unlocked and he could go, when the years-damp, bloated, fish-smelling hands closed softly around his throat and he was turned implacably around to stare into that dead and purple face. (p. 328)

No. God damn it, no! That wasn’t supposed to happen. These things just aren’t supposed to. The kid doesn’t get taken by the monster. He was okay, god damn it, O fucking kay! For about thirty seconds, I was determined to never read another word of The Shining. Then I decided that, if I did that, I would never know what had happened, and that would be far, far worse. So I finished and loved the book. But that scene scared me a hair’s breadth short of badly enough to make me give up on horror, and it did much the same thing on reread.

I think the reasons it’s so effective are fairly obvious, here. The investigation of the disturbance is something that we all know, and we play along with King for a bit when he first shows us the monster. Nice description, cool special effects, etc. Then it sits up, and the stakes raise a bit, but it’s okay, because Danny’s running to the door.

This is where the scene goes from entertaining to brilliant. See, here, horror comes from hope. Danny’s going to be okay, if he can just get to that door, except that it won’t open. Alright, fine, we expect the first attempt to fail, but there is a way out, there certainly is because Danny’s found it. And then King snatches that hope away, and it’s far more painful to have your chances dashed before your eyes than it is to have never had a chance.


The Ash Tree builds up its story of witchcraft and vengeance in an engaging but not revolutionary manner. Your average horror reader will no doubt be able to guess that when the rest of the party wishes Sir Richard a better night, his odds aren’t too great. Things happen exactly as you’d expect. What you probably won’t expect, though, is the friendly, inviting way in which the tragedy is told, the amiability of the words multiplying their effect tenfold:

And now we are in his bedroom, with the light out and the Squire in bed. The room is over the kitchen, and the night outside still and warm, so the window stands open.

There is very little light about the bedstead, but there is a strange movement there; it seems as if Sir Richard were moving his head rapidly to and fro with only the slightest possible sound. And now you would guess, so deceptive is the half-darkness, that he had several heads, round and brownish, which move back and forward, even as low as his chest. It is a horrible illusion. Is it nothing more? There! something drops off the bed with a soft plump, like a kitten, and is out the window in a flash; another – four – and after that there is quiet again.

“Thou shalt seek me in the morning, and I shall not be.”

As with Sir Mathew, so with Sir Richard – dead and black in his bed! (p. 48)

The simple, unadorned language, the easy candor of the words, all of it lures you in to the easy confessions of a friend. Instead, you’re treated to the writhing monstrosities that cover a sleeping, a dying, man’s form.

Lovecraft is unmatched when it comes to atmosphere. A Shadow Over Innsmouth builds up a rich tapestry of history and weaves a palpable feeling of unease. Still, Lovecraft stories are more cerebral than visceral, the ultimate horror more philosophical than emotional. Or, at least, that’s true of every story besides A Shadow Over Innsmouth. Because, see, while I was getting drawn further and further in by the view from the window, something was coming up the stairs:

I was irresolutely speculating on when I had better attack the northward door, and on how I could least audibly manage it, when I noticed that the vague noises underfoot had given place to a fresh and heavier creaking of the stairs. A wavering flicker of light shewed through my transom, and the boards of the corridor began to groan with a ponderous load. Muffled sounds of possible vocal origin approached, and at length a firm knock came on my door. (p. 842)

That knock broke all the rules. Lovecraft stories were about approaching elder gods, about learning horrible truths, about realizing that some cosmic force was about to crush your world without ever really knowing it was there. A Shadow Over Innsmouth, though, climaxes with a chase scene. All of a sudden, the cosmic force was right fucking behind you, and you were running for your life. The descriptive language that drew you so far into the story is suffocating, trapping the character in a world of sludgy details.

I read this story in a sitting at an airport, and I didn’t look up once until I was done. If I’d gotten there a few minutes later, I would’ve missed my plane without noticing until I’d turned the last page. As it was, I was practically shaking when I took my seat.


Sandkings is the story of a horrible thing happening to a horrible person. No big deal, right? Sucks for him, we laugh, move on, etc. Well, not quite. Because this bad thing is an army of sandkings all over every inch of his house. And those things are freaking terrifying, no matter who they’re directed at. It’s impossible to appreciate how much of a crescendo this tale builds to without reading it. The sandkings are everywhere and unstoppable, and the specialists called in to defeat them are slaughtered. The main character runs and…well, the twist in the final sentences is just yet another break breakingly awful thing about this story. Unfortunately, no quotes here, as I’ve been meaning to reread Sandkings for a while now, and I don’t want to dilute the effect by rustling through it a few days beforehand.


Banquet for the Damned’s opening is filled with little dream sequences. To crib my own review:

Throughout the first quarter of the narrative, we find ourselves inside character after character’s heads. They are not in their beds. They do not know how they got where they are. They have been suffering increasingly disturbing nightmares for days on end. Within a few pages, they will be dead. The inevitability of these sections is horrifying, and I found myself reading as fast as I could, sometimes having to force myself to not skip whole paragraphs, because growing acquainted with these pre-damned characters, understanding their thoughts and what makes them tick, was simply too painful. And, since this is horror, I mean that in the best possible way.

Horror can come from hope and from hopelessness, and this was definitely the latter. Disorientation begins the scenes and death ends them, the same every time, and you’re left watching as yet another sleepwalker is ripped to shreds. It’s a night empty of cloud and as still as space (p. 1), and the reader’s all too aware that it will end with death.


So, readers, what're your special scenes?

Stephen King - 'Salem's Lot

Being in the town is a daily act of utter intercourse, so complete that it makes what you and your wife do in the squeaky bed look like a handshake. Being in the town is prosaic, sensuous, alcoholic. And in the dark, the town is yours and you are the town’s, and together you sleep like the dead, like the very stones in your north field. There is no life here but the slow death of days, and so when the evil falls on the town, its coming seems almost preordained, sweet and morphic. It is almost as though the town knows the evil was coming and the shape it would take. (p. 315)

Published in 1975, 631 pages long, King’s second novel, ‘Salem’s Lot, is often considered the best vampire novel ever written, as the back so proudly states. Does it live up to its reputation as one of King’s best novels? Yes, though not quite on the level of his very finest works.

Stephen King debuted with Carrie. Carrie showed King’s strengths at both characterization and horror, as the guilt of Sue Snell and Margaret White rose in tandem. What the book did not show was King’s skills at working with people as a group, with manipulating and personifying an entire social set at once. Besides the principle characters, the cast of Carrie was fairly shallow and underdeveloped. (That’s not to say that Carrie is a bad book, mind you, merely a different book.)

‘Salem’s Lot, by contrast, is the first time that King unleashes his full powers on a large scale. The town of Jerusalem’s Lot is, in many ways, the center of the story. King builds up the people of the town, the town’s backstory and idiosyncrasies, and the relationships that define it. King’s characters are a varied bunch, most of them being pushed to the edges of their lifestyles and personalities. ‘Salme’s Lot is a town of myriad small evils, from adultery to abuse to things darker still. Each of those binds the town closer together rather than damaging it. The Lot is home to an inbred web of ties that, while occasionally dark, make it what it is. It’s a place of comforts and gossips, competent preachers and small scale alcoholics, happy couples and betraying spouses.

King establishes the main characters with care, Ben Mears and Susie Norton each growing and changing over the course of the book. Around them, he gives the Lot life. People seen in the periphery of the main story are given chapters or scenes of their own, exposing their changes and stagnations to the world. These glimpses are generally brief, but they’re both memorable due to the vividness of what’s described and because of their proximity to what’s already been created. The characterization of the Lot soon starts to snowball, with each shred of information shedding light on a dozen other lives.

In the same way that he brings a character’s quirks to light through their everyday qualities, King’s prose uses down to earth diction and comparisons to the most basic of terms to illuminate his world. It’s a style so mundane as to be almost simplistic, and yet it feels anything but, taking familiar images and morphing them into new forms, taking your routines and twisting them into unfamiliar and discomforting shapes:

The fellow in question had driven up to Crockett’s office on a shimmering July afternoon just over a year ago. He got out of the car and stood on the sidewalk for a moment before coming inside, a tall man dressed in a sober three-piece suit in spite of the day’s heat. He was as bald as a cueball and as sweatless as same. His eyebrows were a straight black slash, and the eye sockets shelved away below them to dark holes that might have been carved into the angular surface of his face with drill bits. (p. 89)

Central to the Lot is the feeling that it is, despite being one of many small towns in Maine, all there is. People commute to and from it, yes, but in relatively small numbers, but they soon either assimilate to the general culture or remain forever outside, looking in. Every change in the Lot is a major one, every new arrival a potential crisis. We see the interaction between Ben and the town in great detail. He adapts to it as it adapts, ever so slightly, to him, and he makes his own path through its customs. And then something, in the form of two more arrivals, comes along to shatter the Lot as it is.

The arrival of the vampire and his assistant, Barlow and Straker, destroys the town’s equilibrium. The disturbances are first subtle and all the more terrifying because of it. The even vaguely astute reader will connect the two sinister newcomers with the vampire threat advocated on the book’s back, but the change wrought by their coming spreads with almost agonizing slowness. It starts with a moment of quickly building and climaxing tension, but then relents for a time, content to spread slowly and let the town grieve and the reader simmer.

When events finally kick into motion – and King is in anything but a hurry to reach that point – what makes them so horrific is the speed with which they happen. Like a plague, vampirism spreads through the town in an instant, a wildfire that sweeps over whole streets in a matter of scant seconds. The reader and characters are left vainly trying to understand the opening salvos long into the endgame, the hero’s actions seeming laughably trite in the light of what they face.

The dissolution and destruction of the carefully crafted ties that King spent the whole novel making is what makes ‘Salem’s Lot such an engrossing work. Relationships are torn apart and character after character isolated, rendering the book’s middle section a constant quagmire of change. And then, in the end, everything settles again into a configuration disturbingly reminiscent of the town’s isolated spirit in the beginning.

‘Salem’s Lot is the first novel of King’s golden age – where he seemed able to master theme, atmosphere and plot with the ease that most of us can only muster when it comes to the most rote of tasks – but it is still not King at his peak, and the work is marked with the occasional tinges of amateurism.

When, a quarter of the way through the book, workers are hired to move a suspicious looking package into the basement of the vampire’s house, the scene’s mood is subtly and powerfully built up. All of that is mangled, however, when the movers see a shirt in the villain’s house. Leaving the victim’s belongings in plain sight when you’ve just invited innocents to come in and take a look? Sorry, but no, that’s behavior as laughable for eon old vampires as it is for genius serial killers and preschoolers alike.

The more serious issue facing ‘Salem’s Lot, preventing it from going to a very good work to a great one, is that the evil is not a human evil. In his great works, such as The Shining, King used tragedy, both natural and supernatural, to evolve and transform his character’s relationships. In ‘Salem’s Lot, on the other hand, the great evil signifies an end to the subtleties that the rest of the book is built from, a simplification from the multifaceted world of the Lot to the good and evil domain of monster and monster hunter, stalker and victim.

Father Callahan describes the world in terms of big and small evils. The first portion of ‘Salem’s Lot is filled with small and big evils both, contrasting against each other to build a nuanced picture of the world. As the tale progresses, however, all of those intricacies are ironed out. The abuser and the abused both become vampires side by side, the cheater and the cheated upon united once the final bite’s sunken in. Using the title of Evil, King is able to shirk away from ever really defining his villains, leaving the vampires and Marstens of his world comparatively shallow and almost generic at times.

Coming along with Father Callahan is King’s treatment of religion in ‘Salem’s Lot. In most of his works, King is highly critical of the church, but ‘Salem’s Lot sees a more complimentary side of the man, where, though the father certainly has problems, Callahan can be a good man as a result of his beliefs and convictions. Still, this viewpoint is not developed. In the same way that we never get a real understanding of the forces of darkness, we’re never really sure why crosses are successful at repelling vampire. Some characters are made into avengers by their faith, then crippled by the loss of it, while others scrape by without being so much as a practicing Christian and yet receive almost the same benefits.

But none of those are real problems. No, ‘Salem’s Lot is not quite a masterpiece; King wouldn’t reach those heights for another year still. It is, however, an exemplary horror story. ‘Salem’s Lot is still a giant of the field and an essential read for anyone interested in reading King or modern horror in general.

And the vampires don’t sparkle.