Frightening Literature

I'm almost done with Zombie. I thought it would be a quicker read than it has been, it's a pretty short book, but I'm working through about 3 books at once; I've also started the Haruki Murakami book The Wind Up Bird Chronicle. Plus, since it is my rule to not read Zombie at night to not get freaked out, and night is usually the time I have to read, I've been getting behind. 

The scariest book I've ever read was probably I Am The Cheese by Robert Cormier, which I read when I was in 6th grade as per (like always) my dad's recommendation. The book is narrated by a kid called Adam, who's story is told in two different formats: first person, as he accounts about his life and his family/girlfriend before everything horrible happened and his bike journey to visit his father, and the third person, which is written in a transcript form and is his interviews with a psychiatrist. Adam's family have joined the Witness Protection Program, and his family is being targeted and are eventually caught. The book's ending is probably the bleakest ending I've ever read, and I remember feeling very freaked out by that book. It was actually worse in that due to the odd formatting of the book, I wasn't totally sure what the ending was, and thought it was more optimistic than what it actually was. (It has a twist ending that's not exactly out there; you have to be a somewhat savvy reader to catch it which I wasn't.) 

It also doesn't help that I Am The Cheese's title is obviously taken from "The Farmer in the Dell," a rhyme that has always been creepy to me. Adam sings it throughout the book, and the book ends with the last few lines of it:

The cheese stands alone
The cheese stands alone
Hi-ho, the merry-o
The cheese stands alone

Creepy.

I used to think that books and stories could never be as scary as scary movies, but reading Zombie and I Am The Cheese are two books that I find just as frightening as any horror flick out there. However, I do think that the mindset you're in has a lot to do with how scary whatever book/movie you're reading/watching- I always find films and books the scariest when I'm home alone at night and it's dark out. I watched Silence of the Lambs twice- the first time, in broad daylight, I thought it wasn't scary at all- the second time at night freaked me out so much I had nightmares. 

A couple of years ago, my dad told me about a story that had always scared him, even though his details of it are quite fuzzy. He heard it when he was a kid, probably 11 or 12, and he always insists to me that he's probably not remembering it right, but the gist of it was there was this young man who is really violent and harming all these innocent people, and he goes to his doctor/psychiatrist, who asks him why he's doing all these horrible things. The man explains that it isn't him, that it's the voices in his head that are telling him to do so, and that he cannot control it. The doctor of course thinks he's insane, and sort of kiddingly tells the man that if it's the voices telling him to do so, that he should just tell the voices to go into his (the doctor's) head instead, which they then do. I know there's more to the story than that, probably something about the doctor going insane, but my dad can never remember it, and even that little bit of the story always sounds scary to me. Zombies, ghosts, vampires, whatever- those things can be scary, but it's always farfetched, whereas people losing their minds is not something fake or imaginary. That, to me, is incredibly more frightening, and it's the main plot of both I Am The Cheese and Zombie.