What Does the Bookworm Say? Scary Books

Hey readers! Welcome to this week's special edition of What Does the Bookworm Say! If your new to this blog What Does the Bookworm Say is a twice monthly discussion post that I put together with a few of my other blogger friends where we spill our deepest darkest secrets on the most controversial book topics! And this week is a special edition because it's Halloween themed! It's our Halloween button just the cutest! Thanks Thuy! 

This week we are talking about what makes a book scary and some of our all time favorite scary books! This topic is just perfect for me because I love scary books! I especially love reading scary books in the winter and around this time of year.  

It's almost hard to nail down the elements that make a book scary but let me see if I can nail down a few.

1. Atmosphere: For me as a reader, the atmosphere is the foundation to a well done scary book. Most of my favorite scary book are set in small towns with a lot of run down houses where they hardly get any sunshine (not to sound like Twilight).  A place where it rains a lot, has a constant layer of clouds and a vast forest area where creepy things lurk in the night.  And not just a small town, but a small town that has a lot of deep rooted history that goes back hundreds of years.

2. The Plot: I love a scary book that has a plot that starts way back in the past in like the seventeen or eighteen hundreds. It's always good when some horrible, unspeakable act occurred all those years ago and something in the present wakes the ghost that is now going to take revenge on the decedents of those who wronged him or her (usually her). Now these present characters have to search through old creepy libraries to read old newspapers and try to find out what happened to make this ghost so mad.  I really like stories like that!

3. The Characters: I also like scary books that feature really bad paranormal characters. Maybe a bloodthirsty vampire that is a serial killer and speaking of serial killers, I love books about serial killers! Or maybe a guy who is a good person is his regular life but he is actually a werewolf and he does really bad thing that he can't remember while he is in werewolf form (like kill people).

I know these are all really random things but I really love scary books EXCEPT books about demon possession. I can't handle that shit.  Fall and Halloween are two of my favorite times during the year (even though it still feels like summer sometimes) and they just set the perfect atmosphere for reading a creepy book. 

Here are a few of my favorite scary books:

If you want to know more about what we think make a book scary, stop by Nite Lite Book Reviews, The Windy Pages and The Reader's Antidote! Do you guys like scary books as much as I do? Do you have a topic that you want us to discuss in an upcoming What Does the Bookworm Say? Let me know in the comments.