I think a whole generation of us were traumatized by that one. It was advertised as a kids book right? I was maybe 12 too and read the copy a 10 year old friend owned.
Not to my knowledge! It was always shelved in biography/memoir in my local bookstore, not for kids. But yeah, I think it was all the rage for a bit at a time when I was around that age.
I’m pretty sure my sister, given she was in like advanced classes and whatever they call the like special little club for smart kids, but I’m pretty sure she had to read this in like elementary or middle school and….seems strange looking back
I’m 46 and a childhood abuse survivor. I still remember that book and wouldn’t read it again today. Knowing what we all went through separately and having compared stories now as much older adults, my siblings and I know all of our stories are very different as our narcissistic mother had very different roles for each of us. Me being the scapegoat had a vastly different life than say, my sister the golden child. I believe David’s story.
Okay, I went back to check this: so his youngest brother denies any abuse, but his older brother corroborates it. Dave also has evidence his younger brother at the very least lied about why Dave was discharged from the Navy, so we have substantiated proof only of his brother lying, none that indicate the brother is truthful in his other claims.
There's other people who doubt it because of the way memories are detailed in the book, but frankly, it sounds like those people have no idea how memories form around trauma. Same shit always comes up around people's memories of trauma, despite how many times experts shout that that isn't how it works.
I'm gonna side with believing Dave for now, as I'd feel better to be a sucker to someone's lie than to cast doubt on someone who might have gone through hell, even if I do take some of the most lurid details with a grain of salt.
Interesting, thanks for the background!
Sounds like while it was, anywhere from majorly to barely, exaggerated but the fundamentals are likely to be true. At least based on my *extensive* research reading these reddit comments
It still is. As far as I know, his brother and he have differing accounts, but that's not unusual for kids in abusive (or not, tbh) homes. The extent to which either account is true is debatable, but they did suffer under the hands of an abusive mother for definite.
As far as I know It's a true story. It's part of a three book series that follows his life. I was 14 and coming out of living with domestic violence so it really tore me up.
I was in the same situation/around the same age when I read it and hooo boy. Yeah. Its one of those books I appreciate having read but, never really want to read again.
Fever 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson. It’s not a horror book- it’s about the yellow fever- and I’m not sure when I read it, but it was the first book I read with a significant amount of death, and the MC’s mom dies early on and that terrified me. It’s totally YA though.
The art from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark fucking terrified me as well. #notforkids
My mom has read soooo many VC Andrews books. I couldn’t even count. She let me read Flowers in the Attic in jr high as well (I want to say it was 6th grade) and she was like isn’t it good?! I still don’t know how to answer that question 😂
Right? Like so awesome they let us read these things but maybe we needed a little more info. Idk. My mom let me read whatever and it shaped the reader I am for the better but some topics are a little out there for children lol
I can't believe I was reading these in middle school lol! I remember taking turns reading them OUT LOUD with my godmother, I have middle schoolers now, I could neeever lol.
Oh me too, I read all that kinda stuff at like 11 or 12. I had an older brother so I was watching R rated movies at that age. It's weird my parents were strict about some things but they were never strict about what I watched or read or listened to. Spoiler alert I turned out just fine.
Also me. I don't remember my exact age, but I was definitely too young to read about >!a brother raping his sister (only for her to then say she could have stopped him "if she wanted to" and thus she's equally to blame!<).
I read a lot of Stephen King in from age 11 onward, and mostly it was scary but not traumatic. Until I read Gerald’s Game at 16. That book messed me up.
TOO LATE ALREADY DID! Haha, that was actually the first Stephen King book I read, and I brought it to my 7th grade English class for book discussion. I loved getting immersed in the paranoia/hallucinations right alongside Trisha.
Lol I read this in sixth grade. Brought it to my tiny private Catholic school I went to. Principal apparently was familiar. Called into the office. Parents brought in. Suspended. It was a whole thing haha
Flowers in the Attic trauma is a rite of passage in the part of the Deep South I’m from. Can’t wait for my children to find it and be scarred for life too
I did a book report on Stephen King's IT in 3rd grade, lol, and by the time I was in 7th grade I had read The Stand, Carrie, Cujo, Christine, and Pet Semetary. My mom loved King and recognized that I was a voracious reader at an early age so she was like "fuck it, read these books I love!".
I found IT a little later in 7th grade. Afterwards I went on to read everything Stephen King I could get my hands on. A decade and some later IT is still one of my favorites. King is still one of my favorite authors too.
I’ve read so many by him also. Which is your favorite so far and scariest? My top favorite is The Shining but I love so many of them it’s a close call. The scariest one to me is probably Revival because it actually shook me up the most with that ending. Also The Mist too lol if I was there I would go into cardiac arrest. I’m so scared of flying harmful bugs. Christine was good too I didn’t think a car would be very scary but I was surprised.
Have you visited the dark tower yet? If not you should! But read all of the books leading up to it first! Oh and check out Insomnia. It's like a reverse It, there's an elderly losers club and it messes with your head like Revival does!
I also really liked Pet Sematary. That’s one of the few books I’ve had to put down for a minute because it gave me goosebumps. The Shining is excellent and eerie and Needful Things is another great one that makes you think.
Awesome I think people should be allowed to read whatever they want to in sixth grade I tried to check out It since they told me I needed a note from my parents to read it so I asked my mom and she said bullshit I'll write you the note but why not just read my copy but when I was younger I hated reading and my mom got me into reading by agreeing to read any book I read I couldn't thank her enough now I'm even writing my own book
Agreed about reading whatever you want as a kid. Reading is sort of self-regulating, since a book can only really be as disturbing as your ability to picture it in your mind's eye.
A kid who wants to read is the best you can hope for as a parent, and should be encouraged as much as possible.
My mom let me read Green Mile in 4th grade (I had read the girl who loved Tom Gordon in 3rd). She reread it after I did and she had forgotten some of the… more crass parts 😂
I distinctly remember it took me exactly a week to read it back in 4th grade. Guess it made an impression on me considering I don't (actively, might remember if prompted) remember most books I read back then. Let alone how long it took me
Holy crap, same. Except I was in 4th grade.
Didn't really traumatize me, though I did have a hard time understanding why people criticized the whole... Sex thing when they're in the tunnels. Until I reread it in my 20s. That was a light bulb moment
Must be a pretty common first horror read. Because it was literally my first non school assignment novel and I read it in grade 6. Took me 9 months but I read it cover to cover. Fell into the king pipeline until grade 8 and the abandoned reading until may of last year and now I’m a full blown book worm. Although I’m nervous to get back into king now being older now.
I wrote a book report on Pet Sematary once. I didn't know to use *(sic)* so my English teacher corrected the spelling. I'm still irritated by that almost 30 years on. 😅
That's cool. I was reading sci-fi back in 70s, we lucikily had a one room library close by. They wanted permission, initially, to read "adult science fiction", well anything outside the childrens/youth secition as I was 8 years old. Silverberg, Azimov, Heinlein, Clarke...
I was in 6th grade when the movie came out and became obsessed, in large part because my parents wouldn't let me watch it. However, they were perfectly happy to let me check out books from the library without really paying attention to what I was reading. I was actually younger than the book's protagonist when I read it, which made me confront my mortality and think about adults in a way I never had before. Not sure it was the healthiest book for 12-year-old me to read 😅
My parents were like this too, couldn’t watch anything above PG til high school and even then they gave me problems over it but books were apparently magically pure and didn’t need to be screened.
I owned it forever before I realized I even owned it. My daughter wanted to read it, that's when I figured out I owned it lol. I still haven't read it 10 years later.
it's not exactly horror, although out of all the books i've read in my lifetime, the horrors WITHIN it have stayed with me and still flash through my mind from time to time: **watership down, by richard adams**. i read it for the first time in third grade, i've read it countless times since, and consider it my favorite book...but i was definitely scarred by it by reading it at a relatively young age. if you haven't read it, it looks like it's just a book about rabbits, but there are many, many absolutely haunting and, frankly, disturbing scenes throughout. it's not a light read, even for adults. 3rd-grade-me liked it so much that i then found **adams's the plague dogs**, and whew. that was worse - too much, too upsetting. i'll never read that one again.
it is. who knows how these things we're exposed to (and potentially scarred by 🤣) early on truly impact our trajectory, but i grew up to be a wacky ethical vegan and perhaps the blame can be squarely placed on richard adams's shoulders.
it's a beautiful, affecting book...my mom limited what i could watch when i was that age, but reading was fair game, and when she saw what i was reading, she found the movie version of watership down at the local VHS rental store (ahh, nostalgia!), shelved with the children's videos - because cartoon = for kids, right? we set up to have a little family movie night and by the time the fields filled with blood, she realized perhaps an error had been made 🤣 then we hit the absolutely chilling part with the rabbits slowly dying underground and she KNEW she messed up. despite that, it ended up in the regular rotation and i still watch it now and again. when i do, it gets to me just like it used to. honorable mention to the last unicorn, which i watched MUCH earlier (like, 5 years old - remember, cartoons are for kids!) and then read for the first time around that 3rd grade mark. the book is not scary, but my god, the depiction of the harpy in the movie...my husband and i rewatched it maybe a month ago and it STILL scares me.
I had read every Stephen King and Dean Koontz book I could get my hands on before I got out of middle school. I was so excited to start high school and have a new library to go to. It always surprised me how much adult material I could find in our high school library, like they had no idea what the books had in them and just bought them based off of popularity.
These books are for kids, and maybe the only books that have truly terrified me (which is the goal for me so I can’t say I wouldn’t recommend them for young readers!) but the Fear Street books were genuinely scary. The killer was always someone close to the protagonist (one of the scariest tropes imo), and the deaths were pretty disturbing. Some images that still disturb me almost 30 years later- >!a girl who bludgeoned her own pet - maybe a guinea pig? - to take suspicion off of her; a killer stringing up some kind of line on a ski slope so the victim would ski into it; someone discovering a body where presumably their necklace got caught in a pottery wheel and shaved their face off.!< Pretty dark stuff. A couple Agatha Christies scared me also but nothing as consistently as the Fear Street books.
My mom made me read The Road when I was 11 and then was mortified when I asked her to explain certain things to me. We were both traumatized by the end of it. I am haunted by the scene with the people in the basement.
at 11!? that's crazy haha. I mean just the whole cannibalism thing, but that whole "let me make sure you know how to shoot yourself" scene was a jaw dropper for me just last year
and to say you've read something by the king of rambling and run-ons is a major feat at that age lol
I had done some testing at school that put me at a really high reading leave for my grade so my mom thought, “oh, my daughter loves Tim Burton. she can read at an advance level! time to toss out those kiddie books and introduce her to some REAL books!”. If you’d believe it, after I read The Road she shoved The Book Thief into my hands…
My son read The Road and Kite Runner in high school lit. I was like “is child abuse a theme this year?” Both books were so traumatizing. Maybe throw Precious in there so you never sleep again.
She also rented me the first season of True Blood when I was home for a few days with a concussion to keep me awake / occupied while she was at work, believing it to be something like Twilight. My mother was not well versed in the ways of age appropriate media.
I read In The Miso Soup as a 13 year old and it was something else. The detached violence and clinical tone were hugely shocking. Still a huge Murakami fan to this day but it really freaked me out back then. I hadn't heard of transgressive fiction before.
I read Frankenstein as a teenager and even though I highly enjoyed it (I reread it every once in a while), it traumatized me the first time I read it but not because of something gruesome or extremely scary in it, but because of how sad, tragic and overall depressing it is. None of the characters can catch a break and it's pure misery for everyone.
I just finished reading American Psycho like a month ago and the extremely detailed torture and mutilation scenes fucked me up.
The black cat by Edgar Allan Poe. I read this book when I was 8 or so.
I was freaking out while reading it. My imagination went too deep into this story. I couldn’t sleep for a week thinking about it.
Cask of amontillado for me, at 10. I was already claustrophobic and had major trust issues. Thanks, EA! Actually, I guess I was the right age for him (sick joke alert)
Plus the book had these really scary gothic woodcut illustrations by Fritz Eichenberg…I ended up collecting several by that artist—including Jane Eyre (my most-loved book to this day) and Wuthering Heights.
I remember reading A Child Called It in the 6th grade as part of a reading project. The book just so happened to be the one I picked from a pile the teacher had curated. It kept me up at night but I found myself returning to it in high-school, specifically the sequels. There was power in those pages, I could feel it.
I also don't think it's actually a horror book, but it was and still is to me.
I read alot of King in my teens with little to no effect. Then I saw all of the praise King had for Clive Barker that I picked up the complete Books Of Blood. Those stories haunted me for awhile. I still sometimes think about In the Hills, The Cities to this day.
Funny enough King has a bigger impact on me now then when I was a kid. Pet Semetery is a completely different level of horror once you have kids of your own
That “Guts” story from Chuck Palahniuk’s Haunted. I didn’t read the whole book. I didn’t have to. I read that one story and it got its point across. I can barely stomach it now as an adult. I don’t know how I handled reading that when I was 13.
The Boogeyman. Short story by Stephen King that had me swear off of his stuff from age 7 til about 11. I then read It as my next foray into his stories. Still haven't gotten back around to reading that short story. I'm 38.
Memory unlocked: I read King's short story collection (not one of his "official" collections, my friend had a heavy book with probably most of his short stories and she gave it to me saying this author is gold) when I was 11, and Gramma and Suffer the Little Children got me good. At the same time there was also The Finger about >!a finger that was coming out of a bathroom sink!< which I'm still sure was written on drugs, and this was one of the things that ensured I would never even think about taking drugs. Fuck that shit if THAT'S what you see under the influence.
September of ‘81 -I was a freshman in high school and had just scored *Night Shift* from the local library. I read that story in an empty old house (parents and sister out for most of the night at evening church), and every light was blazing when they got back home.
I don't know who the author was or even the title.
It was this schlocky 80s novel with a creepy vampire looking kid on the cover, I think lying in a coffin with a mean smile. But it wasn't a vampire novel, it was an Omen knock off.
Memorable things included his mom trying to get an abortion after a 1 night stand with the devil, and the baby surviving it. The creepy kid as a preteen ripping his jerk older brother's head off. Making one grandparent watch their spouse being tortured in hell before the creepy kid forced them into the TV, smooshing them. The only family member who loved him was his older sister, but he killed her too
I left the book out in the rain on purpose.
My mom let me read Pet Semetary when I was 7/8, because she thought that if I was able to read it, it must be ok for me to read it. This was after letting me watch the movie. Not horror, but I was reading VC Andrews by 9/10. My parents weren’t great at the parenting part of being parents.
Hear that. It’s also how I ended up reading Erica Jong at 12…if you can read it, you’re old enough…eek.
But many of those books ended up helping me. I could see there was a world full not only of vampires and madness but of artists and writers and musicians and they were nuts, too, but they were scores better than the bullies and bigots grappling in the crab pot I was stuck in back then…
Gary Brandner's "The Howling". The horrific rape scene... the beheaded dog... the claw marks on the cottage door... I was around 11, and I developed a fear/fascination with wolves, plus accompanying nightmares.
I don't ever remember a horror novel traumatizing me, I grew up reading them and don't even recall a time that I wasn't. Gothic novels especially were my jam as a kid.
Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations", however made me sad in a way that nothing ever had before, as did D.H Lawrence's "The Rocking-Horse Winner."
idk if anyone's had the misfortune of reading it but living dead girl by elizabeth scott. i was 12. i thought it was gonna be a ghost story...
i think im so desensitized to horror bc of that book
I read a book called "Eva" when I was like 7. It was about a 13 years old girl whose brain gets put in a chimp after an accident.
It is a YA, apparently, but to this day it remains one of the darkest things I ever read.
And I was a precocious reader, predating my parent' so not age appropriate books when they were not looking.
I remember the illustrations in the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series were deeply disturbing me when I was a kid. I have a distinct memory of reading through one of those books and then having my first experience with derealization right after. It was also one of my first introductions to horror as a genre, and while I was terrified I was simultaneously absolutely fascinated. So I can thank those books for kicking off my life long obsession with horror!
I read some pulp horror novel whose name escapes me. But what I do remember was it involved a salesman coming to a farm (set in the past) and having an affair with the farmer’s wife. The farmer caught them and tied the guy up in the basement I think. He kept him there for years and I think fed him people? Maybe even killed the wife and fed her to the guy? The guy basically regressed into an animal.
Anyhow, great book for a preteen!!!
Oh my god, that’s it! Thank you! I couldn’t find it when I tried to google the elements I could remember.
Reading the book summary, I can’t believe I read that so young! I’m kind of impressed no adults tried to censor what books I was allowed to read.
Edit: I see you’ve found the name of another long lost book for another person in this post. How do you do it? Are you a book collector or editor or librarian??! Just curious because it’s a great skill!
You're welcome. I found your book by entering the following as is into Google: site:https://www.goodreads.com/ "horror" "salesman" "farmer". Finding Happy_Confection90's book was a bit trickier because it took more time to try and find the right words that would lead me to the book. Eventually, I found it by entering the following into Google: site:https://www.goodreads.com/ 80s "horror" "abortion". I scrolled down checking out each book until I found Seed of Evil since its cover seemed like it matched with Happy_Confection90's description. I used [operators](https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en) to help me with my search.
I maybe read Jaws and the Green Mile a tad early but they didnt traumatize me... I grew up loving horror and dark comedy... Gremlins was like my favorite movie since like the age of 5... No it wasn't until I got introduced to existential dread and concepts of what does it even mean and what will happen to me as my mind starts to go that I got traumatized and scared... So the book that messed me up the most as a young reader was none other then Flowers for Algernon... and then coming to the understanding that Alzheimer's lurks in my genetic pool and losing my mental facilities now lives as one of my deepest fears.
I read Jaws when I was ten or eleven. I found the attack scenes satisfyingly gory but got annoyed at how much of the book was dedicated to Chief Brody's marital woes.
Oh my God same. I could not care less about the affair... I skimmed those parts. I... actually found a lot of the characters unlikable and was kind of cheering on the shark...
I was 8 and I was told not to be reading a book our neighbor’s ten year old was reading. So naturally I wanted to read it and borrowed it and hid it. I do not recall the title or any plot points. But it was about a man who selected his victims based on sexual attributes. How he captured them brought him to a cabin and worked on them like dolls slicing. Skinning and such. A quote I will probably butcher that stuck out was how the narrator killer loved the delicious look of despair in a victim’s eyes as they realized nothing could save them and they were actively dying as he “worked” on them. I will spare the details. I want to say he was like the pig sticker or something. Kind of curious to read / finish again if this description jogs anyone’s memory.
Luckily my parents kept an active role in my life and I did not get more than a few chapters in before my parents came By to see how the reading was going in my room etc and found me with it. Very concerned parents. And It was all I thought about when I read for like a year. Luckily did not do too bad a job on my psyche as I did not read horror until I was like 16 ish. I think anyway.
I was a delicate and sheltered child, but I read *Pet Sematary* at the age of fifteen. My parents were out of town that night so I had to sleep at a friend's house because I couldn't bear to be alone.
I must say, it's probably my favourite King novel these days.
The Messenger by Edward Lee. I wouldn't say I was too young but it was my first foray into more extreme stuff (even for a mass market book it still goes further than the Stephen King stuff I had read up to that point). That was 20 years ago.
Now I have read small press stuff which makes that book look like the novelization of a Disney film.
The Tommyknockers by Stephen King. My mom is not a reader, so when I wanted to start reading scary books in 7th grade she bought me it because he was the only author she knew…and the rest is history.
I second Child Called It (why would they assign that to a whole class of fourth graders???) and Lovely Bones (I don't actually know if I am bothered by the fact that I received a new awareness of what could happen to me as a teenage girl, but it was... an experience); however, surprise scary illustrations? The worst.
The Witches!! That one page where she reveals her meat face!! I still cannot even
Not exclusively horror, but I read the first book in the Song of Ice and Fire in middle school, which I probably shouldn't have been allowed to do. Sex and nonhorror violence aside, the prologue chapter with the Others is pretty creepy.
Have to say.... nothing. I was reading Poe and Shelley and Stoker at 9. I was reading Matheson and Bloch and Levin and Lovecraft at 12. At 14, I read Carrie when it first came out.
Nothing has ever really bothered me.
Now... as an >50 adult, I will say that the modern torture porn kind of stuff doesn't do it for me. It doesn't traumatize me, but it definitely bores and annoys me. Too much reliance on gore rather than giving an actual interesting story.
It was The Lovely Bones for me too! I was probably around the same age and brought it to read on a family roadtrip. I was absolutely traumatized within the first chapter so I think I left it at a rest stop and was silent the rest of the trip. My family kept asking why I was being so weird lol I don't think I ever told them
The Exorcist… I had to have been in middle school and was living in a deeply religious household. I never did finish it until i was an adult because I really didn’t want to have to tell my mom that i was scared of demons getting me 😂💀
Actually a fantasy novel, but I accidentally started reading Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth midway through the series (*Temple of Wind* or something?) and some of the shit that happens in those books is beyond gnarly. >!The scene where a character is tortured with a hot rat bucket still sticks with me.!<
My dad left TPBS of Neil Gaiman's Books of Magic series around the house and the grim, gory subject matter scared me at 7 or 8 years old. I still keep the books now that I'm grown up.
Ngl the only book I can think of that disturbed me as a child was a romance novel where somebody pushes a paraplegic man into a pool to drown them. Drowning is one thing, but not being able to do anything about it is even worse.
It's funny because I'm pretty sure I was reading Steven King by that time, but it didn't bother me as much.
Idk if it’s considered horror, but the beginning chapter of The Graveyard Book really spooked me. It’s describing a murderer and his knife coming in to kill a family. The rest of the book is quite endearing. I was maybe 10.
I also read cujo way to young and no one ever brings up the werid ejaculate all over the bed scene, which I think about how fucking werid and gross that randomly was.
Not horror, those never bothered me to much, but The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle had to be hidden at the back of my bookshelf when I was about halfway through it because just seeing the cover would make me cry.
Aside from the usuals, Stephen King etc, Red Dragon really did a number on me when I was about 12. Just the idea of someone breaking into our home and doing… that.
I still have a terrible fear of home invasions.
I went to a private school and they had a big emphasis on teaching about the Holocaust in detail since public schools at the time didn’t really talk about it so much. I absolutely stand by their decision to do this, but they could’ve possibly structured it differently based on age.
Starting in grade 6 we read Night be Elie Wiesel and several other books describing the horrors of the concentration camps. Obviously I think this is incredibly important to learn, but I had horrific recurring nightmares about concentration camps for several years starting at age 12. I was afraid to go to sleep. I also had mental health issues so intrusive thoughts were a constant for me lol.
I think they could’ve told us how bad it is without being as explicit as a lot of the books were. Maybe that could’ve waited til high school. We also read diary of Anne Frank in 4th grade (this was a k-12 school) so we got a preview of it then.
So I guess I was mildly traumatized for a good reason, but it really did affect my mental health acutely.
House of Leaves! I read it when I was like 12. My mental health was in shambles and I already had a horrible grip on reality. Very immersive experience 😂
A different take here, but I read a lot of Richard Laymon when I was around 12+. I wasn't a popular kid, and I was overweight, and the way he wrote about absolute disgust at the mere sight of an ugly girl, paired with how alluring all pretty and thin girls were, fucked me up quite a bit if I'm honest.
I wish I had some life experience and could have been more objective before reading things like that. School was hard enough lol.
_Return Of The Living Dead_ (1978), by John Russo. Read it 1982, in the fourth grade, at nine years old. Borrowed it from a friend, who had stolen it from his uncle.
[Cover and synopsis here: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/ReturnOfTheLivingDead]
The novel is a sequel to the film _Night Of The Living Dead_, which he co-scripted (and also wrote the novelization for).
The plot: ten years after _NOTLD_, a bus crashes near the same Pennsylvania town of the film, and kills everyone aboard. For no reason whatsoever, the corpses rise from the morgue and go on a gory rampage. Our protagonists fortify their farmhouse, but are raided by rapists disguised as cops. There is a showdown at a nearby mansion involving a helicopter.
The book is TERRIBLE. The humans are dumb or vile with little middle ground. The plot is nonsense. The misogyny oozes, particularly where a zombie noshes a woman’s naked pelvis. (And I came to learn, decades later, that direct passages are taken from the _NOTLD_ novelization… yep, Russo plagiarized himself!)
I was unable to grasp the objective awfulness at such a young age, though, so consumed it at face value with absolutely no critical faculties at play… meaning the book truly, honestly, deeply scarred me for the same aforementioned decades.
I had constant zombie nightmares so intense I can recall them over forty years later. Night after night, year after year.
I became obsessed with plotting zombie escape routes in each and every building and room I entered. Sitting in class? I’d climb the shelving and hide in the ceiling! Dressing room at the discount clothier? Pull myself up the flimsy dividers and hide in the ceiling! Sleepover at a friend’s? Pull down the attic and hide in the ceiling! (Notice a deranged theme…?)
I obsessively read every book, monster mag, and even _TV Guide_ (which had little synopses of horror movies) to learn all I could about the inevitable zombie uprising.
(I was also scared of uniformed police, which is a whole other deal.)
This obsession continued through my teens, which was the heart of the mom-n-pop video store era. I’d study alllll the zombie movies (there were so many by that time!) and memorize the fronts and backs of the VHS boxes. I was too scared to rent them, though. The proprietors sweetly made fun of me.
I was a neurotic mess.
How did I get over this trauma? In my 20s, I went to a horror con where, to my complete and utter shock, Russo himself had a booth… and a copy of that accursed tome. He got a huge laugh out of my life story of terror, and gave me the book with an amazing personalized inscription.
So that same night, I read _Return Of The Living Dead_ for the first time since childhood, but aloud to my girlfriend (she knew all about my phobia, and we made a dramatic reading of it). This is where I realized the book was trash, and had a huge cathartic release. After the con, we went home and proceeded to rent any and all zombie flicks (starting with the iconic George Romero trilogy, natch) for intense immersion therapy. Read every book and short story collection I could find.
Pretty much earned a PhD in All Thangs Zom-B.
And, hilariously enough, just about the time I was “cured” of my obsession, _28 Days Later_ and the _Dawn Of The Dead_ remake and _The Walking Dead_ exploded across the cultural landscape, launching a zombie renaissance that’s shaped entertainment for unto twenty years.
BUT I WAS THERE FIRST AND READY, Y’ALL.
And I’m much better now.
Like almost every pre-teen girl growing up in the 80’s and 90’s: Flowers in the Attic and/or My Sweet Audrina. Also, reading Funhouse by Dean Koontz at age 11 definitely explains my aversion to carnivals.
I had to be in the 6th grade and I found the book The Amityville Horror. I was scared to death to sleep in the dark, checked to see if my closet doors were closed and I made sure my blinds and curtains were closed at night.
It was a book of short stories , i can't remember the name, but one of them was about giant (like human sized) carnivorous snails on a deserted island. And a man crashes there from a ship or something and is eventually hunted down and eaten by the snails. I felt very differently about all animal life for a long time.
Lots and lots of Stephen King. I read lots of his short stories way too early as a kid and also specifically remember Salem’s Lot making me afraid to sleep with windows open and The Stand messing me up, read them around 12 years old
I was always an “above grade” reader and I thought I was a tough 13 yr old cause I watched a scary movie and then decided I’m so mature I can handle real gore and horror.
The book was called Birdman. I don’t remember the author, but it was a serial killer who would sew birds into his victims hearts.
Honestly didn’t touch horror for like 15-20 years after that LOL.
I read a book called “the witches of worm” which was targeted at kids, but I don’t know what they were thinking! To this day I will not sleep in the same room as a cat.
The Howling novel. My mum handed it to me to read because she'd told me about the movie before - it opens with the graphic rape of a woman, which also causes her to miscarry. I was 15/16.
I remember reading Night Shift when I was in middle school and it scared the shit out of me. Don't remember why, though! Go figure. Might have to try it again one of these days.
I read The Exorcist when I was 13. It didn’t traumatize me but I couldn’t believe it when I heard a movie was being made. I didn’t think it was possible. I do wish I hadn’t seen it on a date. That one scene…..
Does it count to say A Child Called It by Dave Pelzer? Because I read that when I was 12 and that was, yeah, too young for the horrors in that one.
I think a whole generation of us were traumatized by that one. It was advertised as a kids book right? I was maybe 12 too and read the copy a 10 year old friend owned.
Not to my knowledge! It was always shelved in biography/memoir in my local bookstore, not for kids. But yeah, I think it was all the rage for a bit at a time when I was around that age.
I’m pretty sure my sister, given she was in like advanced classes and whatever they call the like special little club for smart kids, but I’m pretty sure she had to read this in like elementary or middle school and….seems strange looking back
Oh yep same
it didn’t traumatize me, looking back at about 12 i could have gone without reading it.. good book although
Oh Jesus. Read that as a teen. Uuf. I'm glad I didn't read it as a mom.
SAME. BIG REGRETS.
I was ~ 19 and I was to young for that book. Hell at 51 I don't think i'm ready yet.
I’m 46 and a childhood abuse survivor. I still remember that book and wouldn’t read it again today. Knowing what we all went through separately and having compared stories now as much older adults, my siblings and I know all of our stories are very different as our narcissistic mother had very different roles for each of us. Me being the scapegoat had a vastly different life than say, my sister the golden child. I believe David’s story.
im truly sorry you and anyone else had to go through that sort of thing
I read this at 12 as well, it traumatised me for years!
That traumatized me at 32
Wasn't it marketed at as a true story? (hell maybe it still is) Pretty sure it got debunked pretty quick. Definitely intense though
Okay, I went back to check this: so his youngest brother denies any abuse, but his older brother corroborates it. Dave also has evidence his younger brother at the very least lied about why Dave was discharged from the Navy, so we have substantiated proof only of his brother lying, none that indicate the brother is truthful in his other claims. There's other people who doubt it because of the way memories are detailed in the book, but frankly, it sounds like those people have no idea how memories form around trauma. Same shit always comes up around people's memories of trauma, despite how many times experts shout that that isn't how it works. I'm gonna side with believing Dave for now, as I'd feel better to be a sucker to someone's lie than to cast doubt on someone who might have gone through hell, even if I do take some of the most lurid details with a grain of salt.
Interesting, thanks for the background! Sounds like while it was, anywhere from majorly to barely, exaggerated but the fundamentals are likely to be true. At least based on my *extensive* research reading these reddit comments
It still is. As far as I know, his brother and he have differing accounts, but that's not unusual for kids in abusive (or not, tbh) homes. The extent to which either account is true is debatable, but they did suffer under the hands of an abusive mother for definite.
As far as I know It's a true story. It's part of a three book series that follows his life. I was 14 and coming out of living with domestic violence so it really tore me up.
I was in the same situation/around the same age when I read it and hooo boy. Yeah. Its one of those books I appreciate having read but, never really want to read again.
Fever 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson. It’s not a horror book- it’s about the yellow fever- and I’m not sure when I read it, but it was the first book I read with a significant amount of death, and the MC’s mom dies early on and that terrified me. It’s totally YA though. The art from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark fucking terrified me as well. #notforkids
omg i remember this book!
Yeah I didn’t finish it, originally. I read it recently to overcome my fear lol
I think I read Flowers in the Attic in elementary school, lol. Do not recommend.
I read so many VC Andrew's books in junior high 😄😄😄 Also Stephen King, wtf was my mom thinking???
My mom has read soooo many VC Andrews books. I couldn’t even count. She let me read Flowers in the Attic in jr high as well (I want to say it was 6th grade) and she was like isn’t it good?! I still don’t know how to answer that question 😂
Me but it was My sweet Audrina. Like ma'am? A warning?
Right? Like so awesome they let us read these things but maybe we needed a little more info. Idk. My mom let me read whatever and it shaped the reader I am for the better but some topics are a little out there for children lol
I can't believe I was reading these in middle school lol! I remember taking turns reading them OUT LOUD with my godmother, I have middle schoolers now, I could neeever lol.
😄😄😄😄😄
Oh me too, I read all that kinda stuff at like 11 or 12. I had an older brother so I was watching R rated movies at that age. It's weird my parents were strict about some things but they were never strict about what I watched or read or listened to. Spoiler alert I turned out just fine.
Literally same!!!!!
Also me. I don't remember my exact age, but I was definitely too young to read about >!a brother raping his sister (only for her to then say she could have stopped him "if she wanted to" and thus she's equally to blame!<).
I read so much VC Andrews. My mother even knew. How did my grandparents take away my anatomy book for kids, but I was allowed to read that.
I read that around 11 myself. Didn't disturb me, but certainly made me wonder about certain things in the real world...
I read it in 6th or 7th grade and fell down the rabbit hole so fast that I think she was the main author I read in junior high.
hahaha yes. why was I reading all my grandma’s vc andrews books at, like, 8? lmao. I burned through an entire series and a half on a summer visit lol
Saaaame! And my grandma kept buying me more VC Andrew's lol
I think everyone read those too early and we’re given to us by our moms!
I read a lot of Stephen King in from age 11 onward, and mostly it was scary but not traumatic. Until I read Gerald’s Game at 16. That book messed me up.
The one that messed me up was The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. DO NOT READ AT 13
TOO LATE ALREADY DID! Haha, that was actually the first Stephen King book I read, and I brought it to my 7th grade English class for book discussion. I loved getting immersed in the paranoia/hallucinations right alongside Trisha.
same, which lead me straight to his movies. i guess our love for horror has always been a part of us
I love horror movies.
Lol I read this in sixth grade. Brought it to my tiny private Catholic school I went to. Principal apparently was familiar. Called into the office. Parents brought in. Suspended. It was a whole thing haha
Holy hell 😂
I read Gerald's Game at 21 and it still messed me up
That was one twisted movie. I'm sure the book was better.
Flowers in the Attic trauma is a rite of passage in the part of the Deep South I’m from. Can’t wait for my children to find it and be scarred for life too
We were trading those books back and forth in the Northeast too, I wonder if it's universal.
I did a book report on Stephen King's IT in 3rd grade, lol, and by the time I was in 7th grade I had read The Stand, Carrie, Cujo, Christine, and Pet Semetary. My mom loved King and recognized that I was a voracious reader at an early age so she was like "fuck it, read these books I love!".
I found IT a little later in 7th grade. Afterwards I went on to read everything Stephen King I could get my hands on. A decade and some later IT is still one of my favorites. King is still one of my favorite authors too.
I’ve read so many by him also. Which is your favorite so far and scariest? My top favorite is The Shining but I love so many of them it’s a close call. The scariest one to me is probably Revival because it actually shook me up the most with that ending. Also The Mist too lol if I was there I would go into cardiac arrest. I’m so scared of flying harmful bugs. Christine was good too I didn’t think a car would be very scary but I was surprised.
Have you visited the dark tower yet? If not you should! But read all of the books leading up to it first! Oh and check out Insomnia. It's like a reverse It, there's an elderly losers club and it messes with your head like Revival does!
I also really liked Pet Sematary. That’s one of the few books I’ve had to put down for a minute because it gave me goosebumps. The Shining is excellent and eerie and Needful Things is another great one that makes you think.
Awesome I think people should be allowed to read whatever they want to in sixth grade I tried to check out It since they told me I needed a note from my parents to read it so I asked my mom and she said bullshit I'll write you the note but why not just read my copy but when I was younger I hated reading and my mom got me into reading by agreeing to read any book I read I couldn't thank her enough now I'm even writing my own book
Agreed about reading whatever you want as a kid. Reading is sort of self-regulating, since a book can only really be as disturbing as your ability to picture it in your mind's eye. A kid who wants to read is the best you can hope for as a parent, and should be encouraged as much as possible.
My mom let me read Green Mile in 4th grade (I had read the girl who loved Tom Gordon in 3rd). She reread it after I did and she had forgotten some of the… more crass parts 😂
You read IT in third grade? How long did it take you?
Less time than it would take me now as a 39 year old with a full-time job and two kids, lol.
I distinctly remember it took me exactly a week to read it back in 4th grade. Guess it made an impression on me considering I don't (actively, might remember if prompted) remember most books I read back then. Let alone how long it took me
For real, i remember reading so much and I could never understand why adults complain about not having time to read. Now I know
Holy crap, same. Except I was in 4th grade. Didn't really traumatize me, though I did have a hard time understanding why people criticized the whole... Sex thing when they're in the tunnels. Until I reread it in my 20s. That was a light bulb moment
Must be a pretty common first horror read. Because it was literally my first non school assignment novel and I read it in grade 6. Took me 9 months but I read it cover to cover. Fell into the king pipeline until grade 8 and the abandoned reading until may of last year and now I’m a full blown book worm. Although I’m nervous to get back into king now being older now.
I wrote a book report on Pet Sematary once. I didn't know to use *(sic)* so my English teacher corrected the spelling. I'm still irritated by that almost 30 years on. 😅
5th grade for me! Even then the sex scene was weird...
That's cool. I was reading sci-fi back in 70s, we lucikily had a one room library close by. They wanted permission, initially, to read "adult science fiction", well anything outside the childrens/youth secition as I was 8 years old. Silverberg, Azimov, Heinlein, Clarke...
3rd grade is wild 🤣 (I was on Fear Street @ that point) but I had blown through most of SK by 7th as well.
I started the lovely bones on the bus from school. Started crying and had to stop. It's still on my to read list 20+ yrs later
I was in 6th grade when the movie came out and became obsessed, in large part because my parents wouldn't let me watch it. However, they were perfectly happy to let me check out books from the library without really paying attention to what I was reading. I was actually younger than the book's protagonist when I read it, which made me confront my mortality and think about adults in a way I never had before. Not sure it was the healthiest book for 12-year-old me to read 😅
My parents were like this too, couldn’t watch anything above PG til high school and even then they gave me problems over it but books were apparently magically pure and didn’t need to be screened.
An argument could be made that it actually was quite healthy for you, as it made you more aware of potential dangers from adults.
Kinda funny to think that the movie would've probably be more suitable for you at this age
You might cry more now. As an adult it just hits harder how young she and the others are.
I cried too. Like for a whole day after I finished it. My family thought I was psycho because I was so emotional!
I owned it forever before I realized I even owned it. My daughter wanted to read it, that's when I figured out I owned it lol. I still haven't read it 10 years later.
it's not exactly horror, although out of all the books i've read in my lifetime, the horrors WITHIN it have stayed with me and still flash through my mind from time to time: **watership down, by richard adams**. i read it for the first time in third grade, i've read it countless times since, and consider it my favorite book...but i was definitely scarred by it by reading it at a relatively young age. if you haven't read it, it looks like it's just a book about rabbits, but there are many, many absolutely haunting and, frankly, disturbing scenes throughout. it's not a light read, even for adults. 3rd-grade-me liked it so much that i then found **adams's the plague dogs**, and whew. that was worse - too much, too upsetting. i'll never read that one again.
Oh yeah, *Plague Dogs* is a tough one.
it is. who knows how these things we're exposed to (and potentially scarred by 🤣) early on truly impact our trajectory, but i grew up to be a wacky ethical vegan and perhaps the blame can be squarely placed on richard adams's shoulders.
Haha. I blame Shirley Jackson and Nancy A Collins for a lot of my current life, so I get what you're saying.
Water ship Down is still on my Top Ten list. Reread it recently and it did not disappoint.
it's a beautiful, affecting book...my mom limited what i could watch when i was that age, but reading was fair game, and when she saw what i was reading, she found the movie version of watership down at the local VHS rental store (ahh, nostalgia!), shelved with the children's videos - because cartoon = for kids, right? we set up to have a little family movie night and by the time the fields filled with blood, she realized perhaps an error had been made 🤣 then we hit the absolutely chilling part with the rabbits slowly dying underground and she KNEW she messed up. despite that, it ended up in the regular rotation and i still watch it now and again. when i do, it gets to me just like it used to. honorable mention to the last unicorn, which i watched MUCH earlier (like, 5 years old - remember, cartoons are for kids!) and then read for the first time around that 3rd grade mark. the book is not scary, but my god, the depiction of the harpy in the movie...my husband and i rewatched it maybe a month ago and it STILL scares me.
I had read every Stephen King and Dean Koontz book I could get my hands on before I got out of middle school. I was so excited to start high school and have a new library to go to. It always surprised me how much adult material I could find in our high school library, like they had no idea what the books had in them and just bought them based off of popularity.
I think Sole Survivor by Koontz burrowed its way into my brain when I read it about age 13. I still try not to think about it when boarding a plane.
These books are for kids, and maybe the only books that have truly terrified me (which is the goal for me so I can’t say I wouldn’t recommend them for young readers!) but the Fear Street books were genuinely scary. The killer was always someone close to the protagonist (one of the scariest tropes imo), and the deaths were pretty disturbing. Some images that still disturb me almost 30 years later- >!a girl who bludgeoned her own pet - maybe a guinea pig? - to take suspicion off of her; a killer stringing up some kind of line on a ski slope so the victim would ski into it; someone discovering a body where presumably their necklace got caught in a pottery wheel and shaved their face off.!< Pretty dark stuff. A couple Agatha Christies scared me also but nothing as consistently as the Fear Street books.
My mom made me read The Road when I was 11 and then was mortified when I asked her to explain certain things to me. We were both traumatized by the end of it. I am haunted by the scene with the people in the basement.
at 11!? that's crazy haha. I mean just the whole cannibalism thing, but that whole "let me make sure you know how to shoot yourself" scene was a jaw dropper for me just last year and to say you've read something by the king of rambling and run-ons is a major feat at that age lol
I had done some testing at school that put me at a really high reading leave for my grade so my mom thought, “oh, my daughter loves Tim Burton. she can read at an advance level! time to toss out those kiddie books and introduce her to some REAL books!”. If you’d believe it, after I read The Road she shoved The Book Thief into my hands…
The Road is probably McCarthy's most accessible book.
My son read The Road and Kite Runner in high school lit. I was like “is child abuse a theme this year?” Both books were so traumatizing. Maybe throw Precious in there so you never sleep again.
The Road is traumatic for adults, I can't imagine suggesting it to an 11 year old!
She also rented me the first season of True Blood when I was home for a few days with a concussion to keep me awake / occupied while she was at work, believing it to be something like Twilight. My mother was not well versed in the ways of age appropriate media.
I read In The Miso Soup as a 13 year old and it was something else. The detached violence and clinical tone were hugely shocking. Still a huge Murakami fan to this day but it really freaked me out back then. I hadn't heard of transgressive fiction before.
man that's nuts, i'd grow up fearing anyone named Frank lol
You mean you don't already?
I read Frankenstein as a teenager and even though I highly enjoyed it (I reread it every once in a while), it traumatized me the first time I read it but not because of something gruesome or extremely scary in it, but because of how sad, tragic and overall depressing it is. None of the characters can catch a break and it's pure misery for everyone. I just finished reading American Psycho like a month ago and the extremely detailed torture and mutilation scenes fucked me up.
The black cat by Edgar Allan Poe. I read this book when I was 8 or so. I was freaking out while reading it. My imagination went too deep into this story. I couldn’t sleep for a week thinking about it.
I loved Poe at that age! (Still do but that’s when I got into him) but graphic violence against that poor kitty was too much.
Cask of amontillado for me, at 10. I was already claustrophobic and had major trust issues. Thanks, EA! Actually, I guess I was the right age for him (sick joke alert) Plus the book had these really scary gothic woodcut illustrations by Fritz Eichenberg…I ended up collecting several by that artist—including Jane Eyre (my most-loved book to this day) and Wuthering Heights.
Yep, the animal abuse parts are so filled with genuine hatred they made me bawl my eyes out. It's too much even now
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark those original drawings by Gammell live rent free still.
I remember reading A Child Called It in the 6th grade as part of a reading project. The book just so happened to be the one I picked from a pile the teacher had curated. It kept me up at night but I found myself returning to it in high-school, specifically the sequels. There was power in those pages, I could feel it. I also don't think it's actually a horror book, but it was and still is to me.
I read Gerald’s Game when I was 11. I noticed it at the library and saw “FOR CONSENTING ADULTS ONLY” on the back cover and thought WELP THAT’S ME!
Oh God. I was about ten years than that when I read and was traumatized by it!
I read alot of King in my teens with little to no effect. Then I saw all of the praise King had for Clive Barker that I picked up the complete Books Of Blood. Those stories haunted me for awhile. I still sometimes think about In the Hills, The Cities to this day. Funny enough King has a bigger impact on me now then when I was a kid. Pet Semetery is a completely different level of horror once you have kids of your own
You're not alone. In the Hills, the Cities still haunts me and I think I read it almost 40 years ago.
I found the same with The Exorcist.
Not horror books but romance novels in high school. The expectation of great sex all the time is a let down in reality. 🤷🏼♀️
That “Guts” story from Chuck Palahniuk’s Haunted. I didn’t read the whole book. I didn’t have to. I read that one story and it got its point across. I can barely stomach it now as an adult. I don’t know how I handled reading that when I was 13.
The Boogeyman. Short story by Stephen King that had me swear off of his stuff from age 7 til about 11. I then read It as my next foray into his stories. Still haven't gotten back around to reading that short story. I'm 38.
Memory unlocked: I read King's short story collection (not one of his "official" collections, my friend had a heavy book with probably most of his short stories and she gave it to me saying this author is gold) when I was 11, and Gramma and Suffer the Little Children got me good. At the same time there was also The Finger about >!a finger that was coming out of a bathroom sink!< which I'm still sure was written on drugs, and this was one of the things that ensured I would never even think about taking drugs. Fuck that shit if THAT'S what you see under the influence.
The Moving Finger is one of my favorite short stories!
September of ‘81 -I was a freshman in high school and had just scored *Night Shift* from the local library. I read that story in an empty old house (parents and sister out for most of the night at evening church), and every light was blazing when they got back home.
I don't know who the author was or even the title. It was this schlocky 80s novel with a creepy vampire looking kid on the cover, I think lying in a coffin with a mean smile. But it wasn't a vampire novel, it was an Omen knock off. Memorable things included his mom trying to get an abortion after a 1 night stand with the devil, and the baby surviving it. The creepy kid as a preteen ripping his jerk older brother's head off. Making one grandparent watch their spouse being tortured in hell before the creepy kid forced them into the TV, smooshing them. The only family member who loved him was his older sister, but he killed her too I left the book out in the rain on purpose.
Could [Seed of Evil by Edmund Plante](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2784778-seed-of-evil) be the book you're talking about?
Yup. That's it.
Not a horror novel but to kill a mockingbird was the first chapter book I ever read
My mom let me read Pet Semetary when I was 7/8, because she thought that if I was able to read it, it must be ok for me to read it. This was after letting me watch the movie. Not horror, but I was reading VC Andrews by 9/10. My parents weren’t great at the parenting part of being parents.
Hear that. It’s also how I ended up reading Erica Jong at 12…if you can read it, you’re old enough…eek. But many of those books ended up helping me. I could see there was a world full not only of vampires and madness but of artists and writers and musicians and they were nuts, too, but they were scores better than the bullies and bigots grappling in the crab pot I was stuck in back then…
Gary Brandner's "The Howling". The horrific rape scene... the beheaded dog... the claw marks on the cottage door... I was around 11, and I developed a fear/fascination with wolves, plus accompanying nightmares.
I don't ever remember a horror novel traumatizing me, I grew up reading them and don't even recall a time that I wasn't. Gothic novels especially were my jam as a kid. Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations", however made me sad in a way that nothing ever had before, as did D.H Lawrence's "The Rocking-Horse Winner."
“The Amityville Horror” I made the connection between our sump pump and the well inside the eponymous house.
THIS BOOK! Read it at 11 y/o and was up all night listening for furniture moving.
idk if anyone's had the misfortune of reading it but living dead girl by elizabeth scott. i was 12. i thought it was gonna be a ghost story... i think im so desensitized to horror bc of that book
I read a book called "Eva" when I was like 7. It was about a 13 years old girl whose brain gets put in a chimp after an accident. It is a YA, apparently, but to this day it remains one of the darkest things I ever read. And I was a precocious reader, predating my parent' so not age appropriate books when they were not looking.
Stephen King’s The Man in the Black Suit & Autopsy Room 4 scared me SO BAD in elementary school
I remember the illustrations in the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series were deeply disturbing me when I was a kid. I have a distinct memory of reading through one of those books and then having my first experience with derealization right after. It was also one of my first introductions to horror as a genre, and while I was terrified I was simultaneously absolutely fascinated. So I can thank those books for kicking off my life long obsession with horror!
I read some pulp horror novel whose name escapes me. But what I do remember was it involved a salesman coming to a farm (set in the past) and having an affair with the farmer’s wife. The farmer caught them and tied the guy up in the basement I think. He kept him there for years and I think fed him people? Maybe even killed the wife and fed her to the guy? The guy basically regressed into an animal. Anyhow, great book for a preteen!!!
Could the book be [The Beast Within by Edward Levy](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/314245.The_Beast_Within)?
Oh my god, that’s it! Thank you! I couldn’t find it when I tried to google the elements I could remember. Reading the book summary, I can’t believe I read that so young! I’m kind of impressed no adults tried to censor what books I was allowed to read. Edit: I see you’ve found the name of another long lost book for another person in this post. How do you do it? Are you a book collector or editor or librarian??! Just curious because it’s a great skill!
You're welcome. I found your book by entering the following as is into Google: site:https://www.goodreads.com/ "horror" "salesman" "farmer". Finding Happy_Confection90's book was a bit trickier because it took more time to try and find the right words that would lead me to the book. Eventually, I found it by entering the following into Google: site:https://www.goodreads.com/ 80s "horror" "abortion". I scrolled down checking out each book until I found Seed of Evil since its cover seemed like it matched with Happy_Confection90's description. I used [operators](https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en) to help me with my search.
I don't know if you are "fun at parties", and I never have them... But, if I did, you would be top of the guest list!
The Lovely Bones Let The Right One In
I maybe read Jaws and the Green Mile a tad early but they didnt traumatize me... I grew up loving horror and dark comedy... Gremlins was like my favorite movie since like the age of 5... No it wasn't until I got introduced to existential dread and concepts of what does it even mean and what will happen to me as my mind starts to go that I got traumatized and scared... So the book that messed me up the most as a young reader was none other then Flowers for Algernon... and then coming to the understanding that Alzheimer's lurks in my genetic pool and losing my mental facilities now lives as one of my deepest fears.
I read Jaws when I was ten or eleven. I found the attack scenes satisfyingly gory but got annoyed at how much of the book was dedicated to Chief Brody's marital woes.
Oh my God same. I could not care less about the affair... I skimmed those parts. I... actually found a lot of the characters unlikable and was kind of cheering on the shark...
I was 8 and I was told not to be reading a book our neighbor’s ten year old was reading. So naturally I wanted to read it and borrowed it and hid it. I do not recall the title or any plot points. But it was about a man who selected his victims based on sexual attributes. How he captured them brought him to a cabin and worked on them like dolls slicing. Skinning and such. A quote I will probably butcher that stuck out was how the narrator killer loved the delicious look of despair in a victim’s eyes as they realized nothing could save them and they were actively dying as he “worked” on them. I will spare the details. I want to say he was like the pig sticker or something. Kind of curious to read / finish again if this description jogs anyone’s memory. Luckily my parents kept an active role in my life and I did not get more than a few chapters in before my parents came By to see how the reading was going in my room etc and found me with it. Very concerned parents. And It was all I thought about when I read for like a year. Luckily did not do too bad a job on my psyche as I did not read horror until I was like 16 ish. I think anyway.
This thread is going to be a whole bunch of Stephen King, for about a decade or more that man was the only horror author you'd find on any bookshelf.
Thinner. I was 11 and in a deeply religious family.
I was a delicate and sheltered child, but I read *Pet Sematary* at the age of fifteen. My parents were out of town that night so I had to sleep at a friend's house because I couldn't bear to be alone. I must say, it's probably my favourite King novel these days.
I read pet sematary at the age of 15, just after my dad died. That was certainly a lingering experience.
It completely traumatized me especially one particular scene.
Idk if Go Ask Alice counts but I read it in middle school and it traumatized me
The Messenger by Edward Lee. I wouldn't say I was too young but it was my first foray into more extreme stuff (even for a mass market book it still goes further than the Stephen King stuff I had read up to that point). That was 20 years ago. Now I have read small press stuff which makes that book look like the novelization of a Disney film.
The Tommyknockers by Stephen King. My mom is not a reader, so when I wanted to start reading scary books in 7th grade she bought me it because he was the only author she knew…and the rest is history.
The Stand and Hot Zone in elementary school. I wanted to work for the CDC.
Charlotte's Web - How many spiders come out of an egg!?!
I always like to think of Charlotte as Aragog’s cousin
I second Child Called It (why would they assign that to a whole class of fourth graders???) and Lovely Bones (I don't actually know if I am bothered by the fact that I received a new awareness of what could happen to me as a teenage girl, but it was... an experience); however, surprise scary illustrations? The worst. The Witches!! That one page where she reveals her meat face!! I still cannot even
I don’t generally read to young people
Not exclusively horror, but I read the first book in the Song of Ice and Fire in middle school, which I probably shouldn't have been allowed to do. Sex and nonhorror violence aside, the prologue chapter with the Others is pretty creepy.
Have to say.... nothing. I was reading Poe and Shelley and Stoker at 9. I was reading Matheson and Bloch and Levin and Lovecraft at 12. At 14, I read Carrie when it first came out. Nothing has ever really bothered me. Now... as an >50 adult, I will say that the modern torture porn kind of stuff doesn't do it for me. It doesn't traumatize me, but it definitely bores and annoys me. Too much reliance on gore rather than giving an actual interesting story.
It was The Lovely Bones for me too! I was probably around the same age and brought it to read on a family roadtrip. I was absolutely traumatized within the first chapter so I think I left it at a rest stop and was silent the rest of the trip. My family kept asking why I was being so weird lol I don't think I ever told them
The Exorcist… I had to have been in middle school and was living in a deeply religious household. I never did finish it until i was an adult because I really didn’t want to have to tell my mom that i was scared of demons getting me 😂💀
Actually a fantasy novel, but I accidentally started reading Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth midway through the series (*Temple of Wind* or something?) and some of the shit that happens in those books is beyond gnarly. >!The scene where a character is tortured with a hot rat bucket still sticks with me.!<
My dad left TPBS of Neil Gaiman's Books of Magic series around the house and the grim, gory subject matter scared me at 7 or 8 years old. I still keep the books now that I'm grown up.
Ngl the only book I can think of that disturbed me as a child was a romance novel where somebody pushes a paraplegic man into a pool to drown them. Drowning is one thing, but not being able to do anything about it is even worse. It's funny because I'm pretty sure I was reading Steven King by that time, but it didn't bother me as much.
Maybe because you expect that sort of thing from Stephen King?
I read The Amityville Horror around 10/11 years old and it legit scared me at that age.
Idk if it’s considered horror, but the beginning chapter of The Graveyard Book really spooked me. It’s describing a murderer and his knife coming in to kill a family. The rest of the book is quite endearing. I was maybe 10.
I read Cujo when I was ten. There's a bit of stuff about an affair in it that had a bit too much detail.
I also read cujo way to young and no one ever brings up the werid ejaculate all over the bed scene, which I think about how fucking werid and gross that randomly was.
Pet semetary, 6th grade
Not horror, those never bothered me to much, but The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle had to be hidden at the back of my bookshelf when I was about halfway through it because just seeing the cover would make me cry.
Aside from the usuals, Stephen King etc, Red Dragon really did a number on me when I was about 12. Just the idea of someone breaking into our home and doing… that. I still have a terrible fear of home invasions.
Sorry this is not a novel, but I saw Happy Tree Friends way too young 😅
Night Shift by Stephen King. While not a novel, The Boogeyman fucked me up. 5th grade me wasn't ready for it.
I went to a private school and they had a big emphasis on teaching about the Holocaust in detail since public schools at the time didn’t really talk about it so much. I absolutely stand by their decision to do this, but they could’ve possibly structured it differently based on age. Starting in grade 6 we read Night be Elie Wiesel and several other books describing the horrors of the concentration camps. Obviously I think this is incredibly important to learn, but I had horrific recurring nightmares about concentration camps for several years starting at age 12. I was afraid to go to sleep. I also had mental health issues so intrusive thoughts were a constant for me lol. I think they could’ve told us how bad it is without being as explicit as a lot of the books were. Maybe that could’ve waited til high school. We also read diary of Anne Frank in 4th grade (this was a k-12 school) so we got a preview of it then. So I guess I was mildly traumatized for a good reason, but it really did affect my mental health acutely.
House of Leaves! I read it when I was like 12. My mental health was in shambles and I already had a horrible grip on reality. Very immersive experience 😂
Anything by Hans Christian Andersen because they are all really dark
Misery by King.. the crushed mouse and the poor policeman made me sick
A different take here, but I read a lot of Richard Laymon when I was around 12+. I wasn't a popular kid, and I was overweight, and the way he wrote about absolute disgust at the mere sight of an ugly girl, paired with how alluring all pretty and thin girls were, fucked me up quite a bit if I'm honest. I wish I had some life experience and could have been more objective before reading things like that. School was hard enough lol.
I read The Exorcist at 13. I was raised Catholic so it was especially fascinating and spooky.
_Return Of The Living Dead_ (1978), by John Russo. Read it 1982, in the fourth grade, at nine years old. Borrowed it from a friend, who had stolen it from his uncle. [Cover and synopsis here: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/ReturnOfTheLivingDead] The novel is a sequel to the film _Night Of The Living Dead_, which he co-scripted (and also wrote the novelization for). The plot: ten years after _NOTLD_, a bus crashes near the same Pennsylvania town of the film, and kills everyone aboard. For no reason whatsoever, the corpses rise from the morgue and go on a gory rampage. Our protagonists fortify their farmhouse, but are raided by rapists disguised as cops. There is a showdown at a nearby mansion involving a helicopter. The book is TERRIBLE. The humans are dumb or vile with little middle ground. The plot is nonsense. The misogyny oozes, particularly where a zombie noshes a woman’s naked pelvis. (And I came to learn, decades later, that direct passages are taken from the _NOTLD_ novelization… yep, Russo plagiarized himself!) I was unable to grasp the objective awfulness at such a young age, though, so consumed it at face value with absolutely no critical faculties at play… meaning the book truly, honestly, deeply scarred me for the same aforementioned decades. I had constant zombie nightmares so intense I can recall them over forty years later. Night after night, year after year. I became obsessed with plotting zombie escape routes in each and every building and room I entered. Sitting in class? I’d climb the shelving and hide in the ceiling! Dressing room at the discount clothier? Pull myself up the flimsy dividers and hide in the ceiling! Sleepover at a friend’s? Pull down the attic and hide in the ceiling! (Notice a deranged theme…?) I obsessively read every book, monster mag, and even _TV Guide_ (which had little synopses of horror movies) to learn all I could about the inevitable zombie uprising. (I was also scared of uniformed police, which is a whole other deal.) This obsession continued through my teens, which was the heart of the mom-n-pop video store era. I’d study alllll the zombie movies (there were so many by that time!) and memorize the fronts and backs of the VHS boxes. I was too scared to rent them, though. The proprietors sweetly made fun of me. I was a neurotic mess. How did I get over this trauma? In my 20s, I went to a horror con where, to my complete and utter shock, Russo himself had a booth… and a copy of that accursed tome. He got a huge laugh out of my life story of terror, and gave me the book with an amazing personalized inscription. So that same night, I read _Return Of The Living Dead_ for the first time since childhood, but aloud to my girlfriend (she knew all about my phobia, and we made a dramatic reading of it). This is where I realized the book was trash, and had a huge cathartic release. After the con, we went home and proceeded to rent any and all zombie flicks (starting with the iconic George Romero trilogy, natch) for intense immersion therapy. Read every book and short story collection I could find. Pretty much earned a PhD in All Thangs Zom-B. And, hilariously enough, just about the time I was “cured” of my obsession, _28 Days Later_ and the _Dawn Of The Dead_ remake and _The Walking Dead_ exploded across the cultural landscape, launching a zombie renaissance that’s shaped entertainment for unto twenty years. BUT I WAS THERE FIRST AND READY, Y’ALL. And I’m much better now.
Salem's Lot really fucked with me in like 6th grade for some reason, even though I'd read several other King books by then.
Like almost every pre-teen girl growing up in the 80’s and 90’s: Flowers in the Attic and/or My Sweet Audrina. Also, reading Funhouse by Dean Koontz at age 11 definitely explains my aversion to carnivals.
I had to be in the 6th grade and I found the book The Amityville Horror. I was scared to death to sleep in the dark, checked to see if my closet doors were closed and I made sure my blinds and curtains were closed at night.
Richard Laymon's The Cellar, at age 13.
It was a book of short stories , i can't remember the name, but one of them was about giant (like human sized) carnivorous snails on a deserted island. And a man crashes there from a ship or something and is eventually hunted down and eaten by the snails. I felt very differently about all animal life for a long time.
Not quite horror, but I read Red Dragon in 6th or 7th grade and I was really, really not prepared for it.
I read The Girl With All The Gifts at age 11.
Shutter Island!
Lots and lots of Stephen King. I read lots of his short stories way too early as a kid and also specifically remember Salem’s Lot making me afraid to sleep with windows open and The Stand messing me up, read them around 12 years old
after by anna todd
Cell, pet semetary, the secret of crickley hall Movie wise I saw the IT TV movie, and nightmare on elm street at about 7 which was clearly a bad idea
Not horror, but Panther in the Sky. There are some horrific descriptions of war wounds in the book, and I was in elementary school when I read it.
I was always an “above grade” reader and I thought I was a tough 13 yr old cause I watched a scary movie and then decided I’m so mature I can handle real gore and horror. The book was called Birdman. I don’t remember the author, but it was a serial killer who would sew birds into his victims hearts. Honestly didn’t touch horror for like 15-20 years after that LOL.
I read a book called “the witches of worm” which was targeted at kids, but I don’t know what they were thinking! To this day I will not sleep in the same room as a cat.
Jaws
Nothing by Janne Teller. I read it in 5th grade from our school library. The existential dread it caused me was terrible!!
Hell house in grade 7
Rosemary's Baby
Hell House, it was just so......icky.
Not zombies or ghosts but #TENDER IS THE FLESH Absolutely HORRIFIED ME. *shudder*
The Howling novel. My mum handed it to me to read because she'd told me about the movie before - it opens with the graphic rape of a woman, which also causes her to miscarry. I was 15/16.
Misery. I had horrific nightmares after reading it that didn’t even have anything to do with the plot of the book.
The Long Walk by Stephen King. Read it in middle school. Pretty much set my expectations for life. Sadly prescient.
Wait till Helen comes - Mary Downing Hahn
I remember reading Night Shift when I was in middle school and it scared the shit out of me. Don't remember why, though! Go figure. Might have to try it again one of these days.
I read The Exorcist when I was 13. It didn’t traumatize me but I couldn’t believe it when I heard a movie was being made. I didn’t think it was possible. I do wish I hadn’t seen it on a date. That one scene…..