The Top 10 Scenes In Literature To Bring You Terrorsleep: Part 2

5. "Blood Meridian" by Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy was divined for these purposes; he tells stories that are so terrifying and melodically written that you feel completely defenseless to the experience. Just sit there and be brutalized! Let his phrasing ring your skull, friend; there is no other way. Of all his novels, Blood Meridian scared me the most, and it is also my favorite, so whatever that says about me is probably valid.  Certainly a good deal of that scare factor is continuous violence where no punches are pulled; we are talking scalping and child rape, gooshy stuff type horror. It was so well written that I couldn't put it down, took it to bed like a four mark whore and suffered the syph of scaresleep for it. I think the reason that the final scene burrowed so painfully into my headhold is because I imagined it so vividly. The rest of the novel is so unrelentingly violent and mean that it almost becomes ritual; you turn a page, you are in the shit. Simple. But that ending is brilliant: it is ambiguous. In a book full of horrific things, you find that the most horrific thing of all is your own imagination when it has been subjected to the worst of things and then the bottom drops out and it's left to its own devices. You are worse than can be imagined. In the end the protagonist, The Kid, is grotesquely murdered by the villain, The Judge, in an outhouse. We learn this not because it is described, but because those who catch an eye get all holy! holy! and lose their shit from fright. All we know for sure is The Judge was naked, and he's a giant fat pale hairless man, and what's left is an unspeakable mess. So it's the worst of fates. And while there's no accounting for pedophilic, homicidal, whale-size albino taste: nein.

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4. "Gerald's Game" by Stephen King

Seriously, this book isn't fit to sit the same bookshelf as the man's other novels. I read it because I was young, had recently read The Shining, and realized I might be on to something. I was so bored (youth? burgeoning sensibility?) that I can't even tell you what in the Sam Hell the book wanted to be about. It takes a creepy--but delightful!--premise and then just bails into psychotherapy. You see the strings the entire time, it's so overtly manipulative. This woman is stuck handcuffed to a bed (sexy sex) after her husband is blue balled by a swift kick and fatal angina. Some voyeuristic CHUD appears and stands watch over her while a stray dog feasts on her dead husband's haunches. Once she's had enough of that, she nearly cuts off her own hand to escape, and then decides to become her own Sherlock Holmes (and therapist). She commences an obsessive investigation into her visitor that eventually leads, grossly, to the revelation that she was molested during an eclipse. I think? I don't remember because I don't care--there's a Nosferatu standing in the corner of my room. I was scared to look at the dark spots of rooms for too long, that my concentration would slowly reveal shape. The kitchen scene in The Strangers, dig? Except this guy carries a trophy box and will totally skull fuck a dead you. Look alive!

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3. "As I Lay Dying" by William Faulkner

This was my first Faulkner, so I was perhaps conditioned to merely flinch at some of his other, more nasty backwoods horror (and if you've read Faulkner, I imagine you are just nodding solemnly). The Bundren family is wagonbound to bury their recently deceased mother. One of the brothers, Cash, breaks his leg medias in res their narrishkeit of a funeral procession. His younger and somehow omnipotent brother Darl cruelly suggests to his simple kin that they cast the leg in cement. They do--logic has little warmth in this dreadful libretto--and it goes as well as any dumb idea, by an order of magnitude. Walking around on a rotting leg encased in stone; I have no idea why that really clung to me, but it's something really macabre to be plagued by, non?

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2. "Apt Pupil" by Stephen King

This is the third King on this list (cocaine is a helluva drug), so to avoid smelling of charlatan lite, I will be brief. Technically, this is a novella housed in a collection (that includes the story that became The Shawshank Redemption. Fun game: go check your television listings. This film will play on at least one channel, daily. In the future, remotes will just have a setting: Shawshank). There is a lot of horror in this little novella (concentration camps and electric dildo rape notwithstanding) but I warned you about my weak spot, friends. An old man--a Nazi, if that makes my fear more reasonable--roasts a stray cat alive in his oven. It's entirely too detailed. I can't even. I was despondent and plagued by that scene alone in an outlandishly mean scene'd novella, whatever that says about me.

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1. "Beloved" by Toni Morrison

There's no way in hot hell this book would escape my list. Beloved is a hyper-literate ghost story, after all. It concerns an escaped slave, Sethe, and the infant daughter she murders with a handsaw when she and her hiding children are discovered. Cut to: Sethe spends a stint in jail, her newborn daughter Denver with her. Everybody spits and crosses themselves when she gets out, because the ghost of the murdered baby, Beloved, haunts her home. The murder--and the state of mind to see that as a promising solution--is not what burdened me most; it was the "rememories" of slave life at Sweet Home and the barbaric treatment they suffered. A lactation rape, for one. Many a lynch, a man set on fire, and the image of men and women with iron bits in their mouths to stifle their speech. There is always the uncomfortable knowledge that this might not be out of the realm of historic possibility. Black experience is not one I can claim to understand personally or individually. But grief, loss, unconscionable pain, and the way those are shawled around the shoulders sometimes in a tight haunt: universal. When Beloved is finally forced from Sethe's home by the women in her town, one is both relieved for their heal, but also a little needing for exorcism, too.

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