Truly Scary Books for Halloween and Beyond

Horror movies have a capacity to scare that seems almost unfairly powerful. Even a bad horror movie — an underwritten slasher, a lazy creature feature, a predictable serial killer thriller — can disturb you with a smash cut to gruesome violence or a montage of shocking imagery. That’s what makes horror movies, like roller coasters, so much fun: They might make you vomit, or even pass out, but it’s scarily good fun to go along for the ride.

Horror novels are a different proposition. To truly scare a reader, a book must weave a more delicate web of persuasion and misdirection, depending on the power of your imagination to fill in the most chilling details. No disrespect to beloved classics like “Frankenstein” or “Dracula,” but in this modern era of on-screen terrors, it can be hard for even the greatest works of literary horror to send rivulets of sweat down your spine.

There are some books, however, that manage to unsettle, provoke and frighten as capably as any movie. These books work on the imagination slowly and deliberately, building an atmosphere of menace that can be difficult to shake. It’s a different category of fear than what’s conjured by your average horror movie: subtler and more insidious, less grisly and lurid, dominated by psychological terror and a sense of foreboding that often supersedes the spectacle of graphic violence. When done masterfully, a great horror read can haunt you long after you turn the final page.

As Halloween approaches, here are some genuinely terrifying books guaranteed to keep you up at night. These are more than simply good reads: They will freak you out.

Night Shift

By Stephen King

King has written no shortage of great horror novels and many of his classics — “It,” “The Stand,” “Pet Sematary” — are apt to raise a few goose bumps. But it’s his inaugural collection of short stories, “Night Shift,” that is perhaps his most purely terrifying work. The concision of a short story makes it an ideal format for unrelenting scares: Standouts include “The Mangler,” the gut-lurching tale of an industrial laundry machine with a mind of its own, and “Graveyard Shift,” the creepy-crawly story of a rat infestation at a textile mill in Maine.