What Scares Us
Blog Tour
Clay and Susan Griffith
We are pleased to make a stop at the blog of Jon Sprunk, one
of the most talented fantasy writers working today. His Shadow Saga (Shadow’s Son, Shadow’s Lure, and Shadow’s
Master) is an amazing work of dark fantasy. It is full of assassins,
secrets, adventure, and mysterious ethereal women. We highly recommend it!
Today, we’re talking about our Scariest Books. So without further ado…
Clay
I’ve read a lot of scary books in
my life. However, very few have scared me. Rather, I like them for the
adventure and the tension and the occult aspects that reach into the real
world. Around age 12, I read Dracula
by Bram Stoker. This was a formative book for me as a lover of horror and
Victoriana, but it wasn’t scary. I read a lot of H.P. Lovecraft and his Cthulhu
mythos. I loved the history he created and the intertwining elements of myth
that connected from story to story. I found the shadowy world compelling and
intriguing, but not frightening. I read The
Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. It was terrific. But it wasn’t
scary.
What was scary then?
Real things were scary to me when I
was young. When I read books that were supposedly about real monsters or true
hauntings, my flesh would creep. It didn’t matter if I believed them to be real
or not, the fact that they were presented as fact, told within a real world
setting by writers who claimed to be telling the truth, made them scary.
However, the one book that combined
the concept of real monsters with actual reality for me was Helter
Skelter. This was the story of the Charles Manson family and the
Tate-LaBianca Murders of 1969. I read it while in high school some ten years
after the bloody events in the book. In many ways, the book is a relatively dry
retelling of the aftermath of the murders from the point of view of the
prosecuting attorney. It is a much less evocative book that the granddaddy of
all true crime books, Truman Capote’s In
Cold Blood, but I read Helter Skelter
first, so it has more power for me. This doesn’t mean I’m a true crime fan; in
fact, I rarely read in that genre any longer because I find them so disturbing.
This one book can probably not be fully appreciated any longer since the libraries
full of murderous mayhem portrayed in true crime books over the last few
decades have overshadowed the Manson family. But for me, there is something so terrifyingly
simple and abominable at the heart about Helter
Skelter. It’s the story of how beliefs and behaviors can be created and shaped
within the cocoon of a comforting “family” structure, and then emerge into the
outside world as evil. There is nothing scarier than that, nothing more
horrifying.
Susan
I don’t
tend to read a lot of horror books except once for a literature class. It was Salem’s Lot by Stephen King. And even
though I thought vampires wouldn’t scare me, having read Dracula and watched every vampire movie on television, this one
made me glance up and examine the shadows every once in a while. Though that
wasn’t the scariest book I ever read.
The comic
book Walking Dead gave me nightmares
once, but I hate zombies anyway so that was an easy scare. It doesn’t count
since you could say the word zombie to me and produce a shiver.
Only once
did I ever have a book truly frighten me. Not because it was a horror book or
because there was a unreal creature in it. Those don’t seem to frighten me
because my rational mind knows they aren’t real.
The book
was Red
Dragon by Thomas Harris. It was terrifying in a new way because I got
my first look inside the head of a killer and found it to be unfathomable.
Serial killers exist. The thought of a human being so cold and indifferent, so
brutally violent was startling. I finished the book somehow though it took far longer
than it should have. I only read it when someone was in the house and in the
daytime. I locked my doors, carried mace, and went to self-defense classes.
That was a book that changed my way of thinking. There are few books in this
world that could have done that. This was one of them.
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Hey folks. This is Jon. On a person, Clay and Susan are fantastic people and superb writers. I hope you'll check out their Vampire Empire series.
