Scary, Spooky and Sick -- Mature Horror Books for Adults Only

We've been poking around the stacks, ever wary for the wandering wails of wayword ghosts, in search of truly terrifying and depraved books to satisfy the spine-tingling craving initiated by sharing saccharin-sweet Halloween tales with the little ones. If you're looking for a book that will keep you up at night - sometimes several nights even after you've finished the story - one of these may be just right for you.

Please remember, these novels are not for the faint of the heart and squeamish...you probably don't want to whip these out when the kids are around and some may even prove too visceral and grotesque for the most courageous readers.

Of course, there's no reason to bypass the standard scribes of the scary if you're looking for a late night fright. Some of the most famous and well-read writers include Stephen King, Anne Rice, Peter Straub, Clive Barker and Dean Koontz. Another author of note with whom you might be less familiar is Bentley Little. His works often take the mundane and familiar, say your local Walmart for example, and turn them into hotbeds of the macabre and shadow cabals.

A search through various Internet forums and discussion groups has also found several books that are so scary they've stayed with their readers far longer than the time they took to read. The following books could be classified as horror, thrillers or science fiction but all of them are haunting and all can be found at the Tigard Public Library (if someone hasn't gotten to them before you):

• The Ruins - Scott Smith
• The Terror - Dan Simmons
• American Psycho: A Novel - Bret Easton Ellis
• Infected: A Novel - Scott Sigler
• Lost Boy Lost Girl: A Novel - Peter Straub
• Lullaby - Chuck Palahniuk
• Boy's Life - Robert McCammon
• The Woman in Black - Susan Hill
• Black Hole - Charles Burns (Graphic Novel)

If you find that reading isn't quite chilling enough, we highly recommend you look into downloading an audio book from our free Library2Go service. Once you login with your valid WCCLS library card, you can choose "Mystery & Suspense" from their fiction sidebar and browse more than 700 titles -- some of which you're even able to burn to a CD to take on the go with you.

If the above options leave you shaking in your boots, you might want to consider these top 10 lessons for surviving a zombie attach from The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead by Max Brooks, also available in the TPL:

1. Organize before they rise!
2. They feel no fear, why should you?
3. Use your head: cut off theirs.
4. Blades don’t need reloading.
5. Ideal protection = tight clothes, short hair.
6. Get up the staircase, then destroy it.
7. Get out of the car, get onto the bike.
8. Keep moving, keep low, keep quiet, keep alert!
9. No place is safe, only safer.
10. The zombie may be gone, but the threat lives on.

~Darren Heiber