Go on, get your Halloween on. We’ve compiled a list of truly frightening passages from some of favorite reads. Which passage is the scariest? You’ll have to read on to find out!
THE FALL by Bethany Griffin
“I’ve been buried, but I’m not dead. I’m not dead. I can’t breathe. What is that sound? Is someone here? No, it’s me, crying and using precious air…
Tremors shake my entire body, but the box I’m in does not shift at all.
I must be in the vault, held in place by solid stone. Beneath the house. The dead of my family press around me. We’re entombed by marble shot through with a vein of pink, a rare and costly stone, thick enough to keep the waters of the tarn from seeping down into the crypt.
Panic claws at me. But I cannot succumb to it; I cannot fall into one of my fits. Not now.”
MESSENGER OF FEAR by Michael Grant
“It was a coffin.
Something told me it was not empty.
I was sure that I would see a familiar face in that coffin. I was sure I would see myself. But why would I be lying in a church that was no church?
Cold fingers of horror squeezed my heart, wrung the blood from it and left me gasping for air. Each inhalation was a sniffle, each exhalation a shudder. My fingernails pressed into my palms and the pain of it was proof that I was alive, or something like alive, and yet I knew, I knew what I would see in that coffin.
I took another step.
Another.”
LIRAEL by Garth Nix
“Then the first Dead Hand pulled itself out of the mill race and turned towards him. It was dark, true dark now, but Sam could just make it out. It had been human once, but the magic that had brought it back to Life had twisted the body as if following a mad artist’s whim. Its arms trailed below its nkees, its head no longer sat upon a neck but sank into its should, and the mouth had split upwards, usurping the place that had once held a nose. There were more behind it, other twisted shapes.”
THE MADMAN’S DAUGHTER by Megan Shepherd
“The noises started sometime in the night, during the hour when the moon was at its highest. Not screams, exactly. More like moans. Howls. Sounds I couldn’t put a name to. I lay in bed, wide awake, staring at the odd shapes the moonlight threw against the whitewashed walls. I couldn’t tell what type of creature he was working on in that bloodred, windowless laboratory. I’d heard the panther make all types of howls and cries on the ship, but nothing like what came from that building.
Whatever it was, it was large.”
EXQUISITE CAPTIVE by Heather Demetrios
“The moon comes out, its cold light filtering past the tall apartment buildings that border the alley. It falls on the Marid and instantly, the Djan, sees the ghoul hiding underneath the Marid’s skin: massive, hulking, and corpselike. The Djan screams and the ghoul’s mouth widens while its borred features slip off. The long black hair becomes coarse strings, like oily weeds. The skin turns gray. The teeth. The teeth.”
CORALINE by Neil Gaiman
“It sounded like her mother. Coraline went into the kitchen, where the voice had come from. A woman stood in the kitchen with her back to Coraline. She looked a little like Coraline’s mother. Only . . .
Only her skin was white as paper.
Only she was taller and thinner.
Only her fingers were too long, and they never stopped moving, and her dark red fingernails were curved and sharp.
“Coraline?” the woman said. “Is that you?”
And then she turned around. Her eyes were big black buttons.”
ASYLUM by Madeleine Roux
“Each victim had been strangled, although some had struggled, the signs of which were evident in the bruises and cuts they sustained. Reportedly, the victims posed to dance looked remarkably convincing, as did those set around the rest of the bar, sitting and standing. Good God, the planning it must have taken to achieve this. . . . A corpse reaches its peak stiffness at approximately twelve hours after death. To kill the patrons of an entire bar and then wait among the dead for hours . . . I admit, even I was skeptical that treatment could help a man so deeply, deeply troubled.”
Which passage is your favorite?