When I was twelve years old, a winter blast hit the state, and there was a major ice storm. One of the largest anyone had seen in decades.
My sisters and I woke up freezing cold in our New England farmhouse. We could see our breath shape-shifting in front of our eyes.
We bundled up and trekked outside. Snow crunched underfoot. Our century-old home was wrapped in ice. The station wagon was encased in ice. Crystalline woods surrounded us. The whole world was glazed over.
The damage was unbelievable. Trees burdened with foot-long icicles had sagged and snapped overnight, their branches littering the front yard and crashing into the street. More accumulations of ice weighed down the utility lines until they whipsawed, knocking the power out.
We had no electricity that day. My mother couldn’t make her traditional sugar cookies. My father couldn’t watch his favorite TV shows while grading papers. The world had ended. No toaster, no twinkle lights, no telephone, no holidays.
All morning long, my sisters and I lounged around in our fleece pajamas and fuzzy slippers, wrapped in blankets. We ate Captain Crunch cereal straight out of the box, waiting for the outages to be over.
My mother went around the house with a broomstick, gently tapping on the windows and knocking off thin coats of ice so that we could see outside—although there was nothing to see but a vast blankness.
My father cranked up a solar powered radio. A state of emergency had been declared. Our area was especially hard hit. Thousands were stranded without power. It could take days to repair. Maybe even a week.
With nothing else to do, I curled up in a big chair and read “The Shining” by Stephen King. Soon the book had me under its spell.
It was about a boy with special powers whose father was haunted by his personal demons. As the Colorado winter descended, trapping Danny and his parents inside the vast Overlook Hotel, Jack Torrance slowly loses his mind, and sinister forces begin to manifest—evil forces that only Danny can see. It turns out that the previous caretaker of the hotel went berserk and killed his entire family, and now the Overlook was swallowing Jack’s soul.
I was so engrossed in this chilling tale, I didn’t notice it had started to snow outside, hard icy flakes swirling and drifting against the house, making the sound of fingernails tapping against the windowpanes. Plink, plink, tink, tink.
Meanwhile, our parents were bickering back and forth, talking in hushed whispers. My mother, like Wendy Torrance, was afraid for her family. She wanted us to trek five miles into town and seek shelter in the YMCA, thinking that our balding-tire car could miraculously traverse the slick, unplowed roads.
My father, glowering like Jack Torrance, insisted that we had everything we needed right here—food, sleeping bags, a wood stove—and he wanted us to hunker down inside the Overlook—I mean, our house—until the power came back on.
Stephen King once said, “FEAR stands for fuck everything and run.”
By the end of the book, Danny realizes that his father has gone mad and it’s time to run for his life. I decided to follow in his footsteps.
Troubled by my parents’ rocky love, I bundled up and snuck outside into the blizzard. I stood in the snowy front yard, gazing up at the overly bright sky. It was no color, really—just a brightness that darker clumps of snow kept falling from. Swirling and twirling forever downward.
I crossed the field behind our house and entered the woods. I walked until my toes began to go numb. The storm surged. The wind picked up. Strands of hair escaped from my wool cap and whipped wildly across my face. Snowflakes caught on my eyelashes and I blinked them away.
Soon the woods fell silent except for the creaking treetops, which made a sound like old rocking chairs. I rubbed my arms and looked around. A second ago, I knew exactly where I was. Now I wasn’t so sure.
Had I lost the path? I couldn’t tell. I tried to get my bearings. I trudged through a knee-high snow drift, so fatigued by then I nearly gave up.
But I didn’t give up. Like Danny.
Somehow I made it back to my house. My family had no idea how close I’d come to lying down in the snow and dying of hypothermia. I kept that little memory to myself for years, holding it inside me, until I finally wrote about it in my novel, “A Breath After Drowning.”
I’m currently writing a mystery about how darkness crawls under the skin of a sleepy little town called Burning Lake, where a rookie detective named Natalie Lockhart struggles with her alienation and loneliness, longing and revenge, grief and love. I write about all the metaphorical monsters she is chasing. About what scares her and how she overcomes it.
Life is scary. Love is scary. Books like “The Shining” let us explore what we’re afraid of, face our fears and conquer our boogeymen.
Here are ten chilling tales to read during the coming storms.
You by Caroline Kepnes
Joe Goldberg is so funny, sarcastic and charming, he’s like the cool guy at the back of the class you could easily fall for, until he veers into ruminations of a homicidal nature. Then you know you’ve made a big mistake. Joe has to be the most deliciously delusional serial killer ever invented. This book crept up on me like a bad dream.
The Fourth Monkey (A 4MK Thriller) series by J.D. Barker
The serial killer genre is a crowded one, but Barker has carved out a unique place for himself with his 4MK thriller series. The evil at the heart of the series is a psychopath so malignant and narcissistic that reading about his life is like lying down and communing with the wet, squishy creatures inhabiting a swamp at midnight under a full moon. You can hear every excruciating sticky inhale and crackling exhale, and you keep turning pages in the hopes that Detective Porter will soon come to the rescue. Things get really spooky when the killer changes his M.O. and leaves the detectives’ heads spinning as they chase a string of bizarre clues. The unique, bone-chilling narrative for the 4MK series will sear itself into your brain.
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
You know that feeling you get when you go downstairs into a dark, cobwebby basement? Well, quadruple it. This is the story of a mysterious house that’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside—where everything feels familiar, and yet nothing is as it should be. It’s a terrifying journey into a realm full of unknown spaces, mind-bending phenomena and shifting shadows. While reading this book, you may get the urge to turn on all the lights and hurl your Kindle across the room, but even then you’d feel something unspeakable lurking right behind you.
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
Patrick Bateman is a soulless Wall Street yuppie who is slowly going mad in 1980s Manhattan. He’s a self-admitted narcissist who thinks of nothing but status. He thrives in a competitive, consumerist world where he views the brutal murders of his colleagues with the same deadpan nonchalance he uses to describe designer toothpaste, 5-star restaurants, expensive business cards and his favorite pop songs. Bret Easton Ellis’s sharp, wry commentary on the vacuous lifestyles of the rich and famous will unnerve you. This book gives “cut-throat capitalism” a whole new meaning.
The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule
Crime writer and journalist Ann Rule met Ted Bundy at a suicide help line where they both volunteered. Ted seemed like a genuinely nice guy. He was intelligent and thoughtful, and he expressed concern about Ann crossing the dark parking lot alone late at night—because you never knew who might be lurking out there. Their friendship is so believable, it’s terrifying to picture this same man bashing multiple coeds in the head with a log and biting pieces of flesh off their bodies in one single rabid night of rage. When Ann realizes that the sociopathic “Ted” the police are looking for is her old buddy, Ted Bundy, he has already escaped from prison and is on the loose. Not for the faint of heart.
Jar of Hearts by Jennifer Hillier
Does one terrible mistake make you a terrible person? This is the disturbing question behind Jennifer Hillier’s grisly, harrowing thriller “Jar of Hearts.” When 16-year-old Geo’s best friend Angela goes missing, only Geo knows what really happened. Fourteen years later, when Angela’s body is found, Geo must testify against her former boyfriend, the Sweetbay Strangler. When he escapes from prison and new bodies start showing up, Geo’s life is in jeopardy—but what really happened back then? That’s the accelerant behind this dark twisty story of flawed characters, turbulent relationships, betrayal, obsession and self-delusion. The ending blew me away.
The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson
How about a poorly written book that will scare the hell out of you? I mean, really badly written. In 1975, the Lutz family ran for their lives from their dream home after four weeks of witnessing insanely weird paranormal activity. The scariest words in this book are: “Based on a true story.” This book scared the hell out of me, even though it was terribly written and full of exclamation points. What scared me so much was that it was co-written by the people who had lived through this nightmare. They said it was real and I believed them. When George Lutz appeared to be losing his mind, I believed him. The exclamation points used throughout the book made their fantastic statements super believable!!! The previous tenant, Donald DeFeo, murdered his entire family in cold blood and blamed it on a red-eyed entity. The best haunted house book ever… if you can stomach one more exclamation point.
Let Me In by John Lindqvist
This one is beautifully written—spare, lean, elegant. 12-year-old Oscar gets bullied at school on a regular basis, so when a strange girl named Eli moves in next door, they become fast friends. She’s as odd an outcast as he is—but much more dangerous. A series of neighborhood murders follows, where the bullies are found drained of blood. This is a ghastly little masterpiece. Guaranteed to get under your skin.
Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin
Rosemary Woodhouse is so optimistic and naive, you just know the world is going to smash her. She loves her husband, who betrays her in the most vicious way imaginable, forcing her to become the primal mother who wields a knife to protect her first child. The coven of witches who are her next door neighbors are so humorously banal, it’s hilarious to find out that they are actual witches, when it seems as if Rosemary has landed in a happy retirement home. The older women fuss over her, suffocate her with their misplaced love and bad advice, and give her tinctures that make her vomit. Her spiraling paranoia, combined with her wide-eyed innocence, drives her directly into the arms of evil, and the biggest shock is that she ultimately embraces her fate.
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
Eleanor is a lonely misfit who may have been responsible for a “rain of stones” on her home when she was a girl—in short, she has the gift. As an adult, she’s a lonely misfit whose world is closing in on her, when she gets invited to join an occult scholar, Dr. Montague, in his quest to find out if ghosts exist. Eleanor is delighted—she’s never been invited to anything before—but once she arrives at the creepy, powerful Hill House, she has no idea what kind of destiny awaits her. Eleanor feels a connection to the living, breathing supernatural presence inside the house. If there is a sad pathos to life, a longing to belong, and that we can never step out of the bounds of ‘normalcy’ and be our unique selves without inviting ridicule and ruin, then what does that say about us? It’s such a creepy setup, you can’t stop turning the pages.
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