Stephen King/Nightmare Fuel



You saw it coming.

Oh, and in case you're wondering, IT has its own page, and so does The Shining.

"The door was crooked.
 * The end of the short story "Children of the Corn". Burt and Vicky do not survive, there are no good kids, and the cult is not stopped. The fact that one of the cultists is pregnant with Malachi's child was somehow the most disturbing thing about these lunatics.
 * "Rainy Season" where it begins raining frogs that
 * Pet Sematary: Especially the scenes involving
 * Any scene of the film featuring Zelda was terrifying beyond words. The fact that Zelda was played by a deformed-looking man might be part of what makes her appearance so traumatic.
 * Apt Pupil. Get face-to-face with non-cartoonish and insidious Nazi evil.
 * Todd Bowden was a pretty normal kid, with a paper route and reasonable grades. The poster child for all-American boyhood. There's just that obsession with concentration camps that you've got to watch out for.
 * The part of the cat scene is that "Denker" mentions getting a dog for the same purpose. Later, he goes to an animal shelter and leaves with a puppy.
 * Cujo and Misery are prime examples. Made all the scarier because they could actually happen. EEEEEE!
 * Insomnia. The main character can see people's "auras", which lets him see how healthy they are... so he can see how badly brain-damaged children in a hospital are, and he can see roughly how close people are to death. When people are about to die, their aura turns into a black "death bag", which is somewhat alive. The villain is an agent of chaos, who kills people because he wants to... and he's invisible and Made Of Air.
 * The Dark Tower has several elements that seemed designed to remind the reader that King writes horror stories. From the first three books we have Norm of Tull, the end of Tull, the Slow Mutants, The lobstrosities, a man getting cut in half by More Dakka, Odetta/Detta, Shardik, and the Pusher, who doesn't do drugs but pushes people in front of trains. Oh, and when Jake thinks he's going insane. And the Doorkeeper, who is a sentient, malevolent entity disguised as an abandoned house. And Blaine the train, who is a real pain.
 * Onward through the remaining four books, of which some of the more notable ideas and concepts include a procedure which ends up destroying little kids' minds because of what they extract. Bonus points for the fact a byproduct of the process is the accelerated growth of the kids to such a point you can hear their skulls expanding. The pain is basically that of teething ... for a solid year or so. Dandelo;  being psychically compelled to tear his own eyes out and then tear his own tongue out; Mordred the half-human, half-spider from the time of his birth; long pork at the Dixie Pig; ruminating on the sound of the   screaming as he is  ; the can-toi; and, at the Battle of the Algul Siento, a hydrocephalic kid banging his head on the ground and dying with a sound like a watermelon being split in half.
 * Salem's Lot. The paranoia that permeates the whole story (a reflection of the real-life time period he was writing about, it turned out), the shortcut the Glick boys foolishly take home, seeing the ways all the townspeople are slowly turned - and the biggest shudder comes at the end, where Ben is looking at his old snow globe,
 * "The Jaunt," another short story. "It's eternity in there..." Contains what is quite possibly the most gruesome and memorable ending to any of King's stories.
 * Mentioned and not dwelt upon, but far worse, is using the Jaunt device (with no exit) as a murder weapon. Technically, the victim never dies. Ever. She is cut off from all external stimuli, alone, with no way of ever escaping. (But the court convicted him anyway.) The defense attorney made that exact argument (that it wasn't really murder since the wife wasn't dead), but when the jury thought of a human being stuck in that state forever it pretty much cemented the husband's conviction.
 * "1408", another short story. A haunted hotel room. It's more psychedelic than Gothic and ghostly, but the imagery (and the protagonist's increasingly disjointed comments) will still make you sleep under the covers. Same with the descriptions of the room's "effects" on visitors. Even if you're not creeped out by the long (very long) beginning sequence where the hotel manager tries his best to convince Our Hero that he should just walk away, the room itself starts messing with reality before we've even seen the inside of it:
 * "1408", another short story. A haunted hotel room. It's more psychedelic than Gothic and ghostly, but the imagery (and the protagonist's increasingly disjointed comments) will still make you sleep under the covers. Same with the descriptions of the room's "effects" on visitors. Even if you're not creeped out by the long (very long) beginning sequence where the hotel manager tries his best to convince Our Hero that he should just walk away, the room itself starts messing with reality before we've even seen the inside of it:

Not by a lot, but it was crooked, all right, canted just the tiniest bit to the left.

...

He pushed RECORD [on his minicorder] as he straightened up, saw the little red eye go on, and opened his mouth to say, "The door of room 1408 offers it own unique greeting; it appears to have been set crooked, tipped slightly to the left."

He said The door, and that's all. If you listen to the tape, you can hear the words clearly, The door and then the click of the STOP button. Because the door wasn't crooked. It was perfectly straight. Mike turned, looked at the door of 1409 across the hall, then back at the door of 1408. Both doors were the same, white with gold number-plaques and gold doorknobs. Both perfectly straight.

Mike bent, picked up his overnight case with the hand holding the minicorder, moved the key in his other hand towards the lock, then stopped again.

The door was crooked again.

This time it tilted slightly to the right."

"Someone must pump fuel. Someone will not be harmed. All fuel must be pumped. This shall be done now. Now someone will pump fuel."
 * Stephen King actually reads 1408 on an audiobook called Blood and Smoke. It's even worse hearing his weird, creepy voices than it was reading the text!
 * "This is nine. Nine. We have killed your friends. Every friend is now dead."
 * "IT" has its own page, for very good reason.
 * The Stand now has its own page as well.
 * Gerald's Game. This one is psychological rather than monster-related. It has everything: paranoia, delusion, voices, and a dog eating Jessie's dead husband. She is handcuffed to the bed and as she gets more dehydrated she starts to hear more and more voices, coupled with someone she thinks is moving around the house while she is helpless, but for most of the story it seems this is another hallucination. She finally escapes by  Later she writes a letter to one of the people whose voice she heard, which involves explaining what really happened and what her recovery process was.
 * Cell. The idea of people going berserk worldwide.
 * And on top of that, the Hive Mind they develop...
 * The worst is that if you see someone bite some guy's ear off randomly in the street, what would you do? Call the police, your mom, the news,
 * The mental domination of people that forced them to put the cell phones to their ears and dial knowing that they were doomed as they did so.
 * There were two things about Dream Catcher: The part where someone plays a tape of the "aliens" imitating celebrities and telling people that they're not dangerous, and the part where the first alien appears, because it was so sudden, Jonesy just turns around and he sees it, no previous signs to warn the reader.
 * Mr. Gray is utterly terrifying. Also, Blue Unit is just a slightly nicer version of Blackwatch.
 * "Survivor Type": A surgeon gets stranded on an island with only some powdered heroin, a couple of knives and the clothes on his back. In order to stay alive, he kills and eats a few seagulls he managed to catch, but he breaks his foot eventually. So he needs to amputate, and realizes afterwards
 * "lady fingers they taste just like lady fingers." Brrr....
 * The Raft: two college guys and their girlfriends go for a spur-of-the-moment swim at a remote lake. When they get to the raft in the middle of the lake, they see what looks like a dark patch of oil in the water. Needless to say, it isn't oil  The tone makes it horribly creepy to begin with, but the idea of waiting alone, trapped, and without hope of escape from an alien death... . The way he describes the deaths is absolutely horrific.
 * The Monkey: another short story, which utilizes and heightens every trope you've ever seen connected to those creepy monkeys-with-cymbal toys.
 * Jang-jang-jang-jang, who's dead this time?
 * Trucks: In which trucks rebel and destroy humanity, blaring demands to their new slaves via Morse code.
 * Trucks: In which trucks rebel and destroy humanity, blaring demands to their new slaves via Morse code.

""I think that in the first three months after my misadventure, my ability to joke provided a slim but vital margin between sanity and some sort of nervous breakdown. ""
 * The Regulators.
 * The scene where Tak "sweetens up" Audrey will make you never want to eat honey again.
 * On the subject of Misery, the thought of being held prisoner to someone that delusional and that fixated with you for a time span of nearly half a year is horrifying.  What's really about the   wasn't just Annie's not-so-subtle threat to, but when the text suddenly went off for an entire page with no pauses, sounding almost sing-song at points. It shows how absolutely terrified Paul is.
 * Annie . Especially when she.
 * She She also made him    It's a little harder to connect to that since typewriters aren't used that much anymore, but   is a writer's worst fucking nightmare.
 * Desperation. How about the fact that  Or the fact that   including the spiders and snakes, which are everybody's favorite animals in the world. Or how about the way that
 * The insertion of the words "I'm going to kill you" into the Miranda Warning near the beginning of the book, and.
 * Dolores Claiborne isn't exactly a horror novel, but the old woman deteriorate into madness from age and realizing she can't stop it. Only Stephen King could turn dust bunnies into a terrifying representation of a decaying mind.
 * Any Stephen King stories involving vehicles. Maximum Overdrive, Christine, and From a Buick 8 are all damn freaky when you consider this is stuff we live with and depend on, and then BOOM! You're running from an 18 wheeler that wants to enslave you, a car with a ghostly rider, and a car that, for all intents and purposes, shouldn't exist.
 * The scene in Christine where Leigh is choking on a hamburger and she sees glowing green eyes from Christine's dashboard.
 * A short story called The Road Virus Heads North where a writer buys a painting at a tag sale called, appropriately, The Road Virus Heads North, which depicts a man with teeth that are filed to a point and an evil smirk on his face driving in his car. Then things get nightmarish.
 * The Library Policeman, that is, Sam Peeble's very own library policeman.  It is a pretty painful scene.
 * Ardelia Lortz.  Fuck.
 * Stephen King writes a story called "The Boogeyman." His description of the thing in the closet having "cabbage breath" is shudder-inducing.
 * The description of the eponymous character in Rose Madder, specifically how she looks right before she deals with Norman. The mental image of the 'rot' that seems to move beneath her skin is equal parts Nightmare Fuel and Squick. Then again, King seems to love hopping over the line between the two. What happens with Norman and the mask could count, too; Rose and Norman's marriage itself is a more reality-based example, since Norman is practically the poster-boy for a Complete Monster.
 * In You Know They Got a Hell of a Band a young couple finds an idyllic little Norman Rockwell town, and it just happens to be populated by every dead rock-n-roll star! Kurt Cobain, Cass Elliot, Janis Joplin, Elvis, Buddy Holly, John Lennon... you name 'em, they're there! And they even put on an incredible show every single night, a show that keeps building and never seems to end! Everyone who visits gets to live there, forever young! It seems like every rocker's fantasy... except it's really Nightmare Fuel:
 * The scene in The Dark Half when they operate on Thad, only to find
 * Also  In The Movie, his skin is pecked down to his bones, his jaw is moving in a silent scream.
 * "The Moving Finger": A man goes to the sink and sees a finger sticking out of the plughole. Just tapping around. Then it
 * Blockade Billy has a piece of HONF at the end when Billy, after his secret has been found out, reveals what the hell is under that Band-Aid on his middle finger when he goes to talk to the umpire who screwed him earlier in the game. It doesn't end well.
 * One of King's short stories, The Gingerbread Girl, tells the story of a woman who moves to her father's summer home in Florida after having a fight with her husband. Not scary yet? Well while there she discovers there is an insane madman who brings women there just so he can rape and murder them. The entire later half of the story is her escaping the same insane madman.
 * The description of the way things look in The Mist after they leave the store. It's like Lovecraft decided to rise from the grave and possess King when he wrote that part.
 * Also, Mrs. Carmondy with her fusion of brutal Old Testament-style Christianity and pagan ritual.
 * Needful Things: The bag with the souls in it. Or the pendant. If not that, then how about how all the people of the town go to town on each other. This time the bad guy didn't torture the victims, he just manipulated everyone and made them torture each other.
 * Watching Gaunt play everyone like fiddles and getting to have brief scenes with him after people leave the shop to make sure we know just how much of a bastard he is...and that he's Genre Savvy enough to avoid The Hero at all costs until the climax, which he thinks he can corrupt him, is terrifying. Also the fact that he's very clearly a Satan Expy and has been doing this for centuries  despite admitting he has all the souls he'll ever need already. It's all For the Evulz
 * Possibly some of the scariest parts of King's works are the point in his career where he published "The Bachman Books". To whit:
 * Rage - A high school loser finally snaps and guns down two teachers and holds his class hostage. Eventually, they all get a case of Stockholm Syndrome, and the one poor bastard who doesn't fall for it winds up catatonic for his troubles. Add to the fact that it was found in the possession of multiple school shooters, and you see why King had it pulled.
 * The Long Walk - An easy comparison to make to Battle Royale and The Hunger Games, an alternate universe America has 100 teen boys pulled from all fifty states to compete in "The Walk".
 * Roadwork - After losing his son, one man takes "There's no place like home" too far.
 * The Running Man - The origin of the Arnold movie, a desperate man tries to win the money needed to keep his wife and daughter alive. Now put yourself in his shoes and see how long you'd last.
 * Duma Key is creepy even before bad stuff starts happening. Imagine being in an accident and waking up with no right arm. Also, you can't remember a good portion of your vocabulary. There's a page describing the protagonist getting frustrated while asking his wife to come over and sit on the friend, on the pal, on the chum because it's as close as his fractured mind can come to the word "chair", and it doesn't end there.
 * The short story "Gray Matter" has.
 * One word- no, one letter: "N." That one was based on an 1894 story by Arthur Machen called The Great God Pan. King considers it one of the single best horror stories ever written and even claimed it kept him up at night!
 * There was one story from the Everything's Eventual collection called "That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French" about a woman who
 * Full Dark, No Stars. First off, the first story has a man being bitten to death by rats (in first person). Plus, Beadie... Just, Beadie, ok?
 * There's a short story Word Processor of the Gods. While the story itself isn't that scary, instead working the angle of drama, look at modern social networking. The pressing of a single key can effectively change reality. Imagine the power, or even the knowledge, if it were to be used by someone now.
 * And then there's "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut" (a short story). The eponymous dimension is literally accessed by wormholes. Now imagine if you couldn't find a wormhole out, or the car crashed. Given the creatures of The Talisman, The Mist, From a Buick 8, The Dark Tower series, The Jaunt and nearly every other inter-dimensional tale by Stephen King, we can only assume that such an event would not end well. Mrs. Todd drives maniacally enough to continually find new wormholes, each new route displays a new forest layout, and Mrs. Todd is obviously so warped from her experience that she might purposefully trap herself (and any passengers) in it. If you stumbled upon one of these routes naturally, you wouldn't sleep for decades. If you were guided by the only actual expert, you run a high risk of not being alive if you get out.
 * From "Skeleton Crew", a number of stories: "The Reaper's Image", especially the ending with the narrator waiting for his buyer to reappear. "Uncle Otto's Truck" had the eponymous vehicle slowly creeping up on Otto until it was right outside his fucking window. His death was also pretty fucked. And "Morning Deliveries" had the most fucked up milkman I have ever seen.
 * Autopsy Room 4, from Everything's Eventual. Live burial is a common horror subject, but leave it to King to come up with . The funnier bits may seem to lighten up the story until you consider the protagonist's final comments:

And similar to some mentions above, you may not able to listen to the Rolling Stones for a while after reading this.
 * Pretty much the whole plot of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, involving a small girl lost in the woods for several days with little food, being pursued by something,, but especially this little gem:

"As she slept, something came and watched her. It watched for a long time. It was not until light began to line the horizon in the east that it went away ... and it did not go far"