It was Stephen King who said there are three kinds of scare tactics: the "gross out," horror and terror. A gross out is when a pile of heads rolls down a flight of stairs to your feet, splashing blood on the walls as they fall; horror occurs when something supernatural or disturbingly deformed appears suddenly and refuses to leave your dreams; and you experience terror when you’re aware of a breath on your neck, feel the presence of a body behind you, but you turn around to find there was never anything there to begin with.
Terror is a fear so deep-seated and penetrating that it claws at your mind until it is consumed completely with blind fright. The genre of horror is generally thought to be limited to movies, but books that are able to encapsulate true terror are even scarier than any horror movie could be.
Reading is an intimate activity, one that is experienced in readers’ heads and theirs alone. No two readers will experiences the same fears and images, as books are able to bring related memories of fear to the front of the mind, making the fiction-induced distress seem even more real. Books are able to blend the line between unwavering certainty of reality and what exists only between the pages of a book.
Horror movies rely on jump tactics and an overwhelming sense of dread to keep audiences on the edges of their seats. These are scary in certain situations, but I tend to grow tired of the predictable attempts to scare me. It’s clockwork how movies insert scares, and instead of watching, I eventually just time the movie to see how long they wait between jump scares.
Books, on the other hand, are the perfect masters of suspense, because the reader determines the pace. Because they can’t physically have a demonic clown pop up from the pages (although pop-up horror novels would be amazing, now that I think of it), books have to rely on carefully building suspense through precise descriptions and event chronology. They develop a fine balance between pulling out the big guns with every disturbing character they can think of and the subtler insertion of ideas that are so realistic they infect the lives of readers where they least expect to find them.
One horror novel in particular that is more terrifying than its 1980 film adaptation, known as one of the scariest movies ever made, is "The Shining" (1977) by Stephen King. King certainly knows a thing or two or about writing, and although he’s written more than four dozen books and nearly 200 short stories, he’s never lost his edge when it comes to horror. "The Shining" is undoubtedly the scariest book I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading, and although I first read it more than six years ago, I do sometimes find those mysterious topiaries in my dreams to this day.
"The Shining" follows Jack Torrance and his family as they stay at the near-empty Overlook Hotel during the winter off-season, when Jack accepts a job as caretaker of the hotel. The hotel tries to claim the very souls of the Torrance family, especially the father of Jack, turning him into a demonic animal that tries to kill his wife and son on a murderously destructive rampage.
"The Shining" has a perfect delivery; it captures the tense interactions as little Danny approaches a fire hose he’s convinced will come to life and strangle him. Beautiful descriptions allow the reader to examine the characters' unhinged mind games as Jack spends nights drinking with ghosts. King masterfully inserts the reader into the shoes of each character, making their fears come to life and chase readers from the pages to the very deepest parts of their minds, a kind of horror simply lacking on the silver screen.
