If you are like a lot of people you are either reading or re-reading Stephen King's
It with the release of the new movie. Originally published in 1986, it has been back on the New York Times Best Seller list for the last 12 weeks. If you're looking for something spooky to read after
It, try one of these.
It by Stephen King
To the children, the town was
their whole world. To the adults, knowing better, Derry, Maine was just their
home town: familiar, well-ordered for the most part. A good place to live.
It was the children who saw - and felt - what made Derry so
horribly different. In the storm drains, in the sewers, IT lurked, taking on
the shape of every nightmare, each one's deepest dread. Sometimes IT reached
up, seizing, tearing, killing . . .
The adults, knowing better, knew nothing.
Time passed and the children grew up, moved away. The horror
of IT was deep-buried, wrapped in forgetfulness. Until they were called back,
once more to confront IT as IT stirred and coiled in the sullen depths of their
memories, reaching up again to make their past nightmares a terrible present
reality.
READ-ALIKES:
NOS4A2 by Joe Hill
Victoria McQueen has a secret
gift for finding things: a misplaced bracelet, a missing photograph, answers to
unanswerable questions. On her Raleigh Tuff Burner bike, she makes her way to a
rickety covered bridge that, within moments, takes her wherever she needs to
go, whether it’s across Massachusetts or across the country.
Charles Talent Manx has a way with children. He likes to take
them for rides in his 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith with the NOS4A2 vanity plate.
With his old car, he can slip right out of the everyday world, and onto the
hidden roads that transport them to an astonishing – and terrifying –
playground of amusements he calls “Christmasland.”
Then, one day, Vic goes looking for trouble—and finds Manx.
That was a lifetime ago. Now Vic, the only kid to ever escape Manx’s
unmitigated evil, is all grown up and desperate to forget. But Charlie Manx
never stopped thinking about Victoria McQueen. He’s on the road again and he’s
picked up a new passenger: Vic’s own son.
Boy's Life by Robert McCammon
Zephyr, Alabama, is an idyllic
hometown for eleven-year-old Cory Mackenson -- a place where monsters swim the
river deep and friends are forever. Then, one cold spring morning, Cory and his
father witness a car plunge into a lake -- and a desperate rescue attempt
brings his father face-to-face with a terrible, haunting vision of death. As
Cory struggles to understand his father's pain, his eyes are slowly opened to
the forces of good and evil that surround him. From an ancient mystic who can
hear the dead and bewitch the living, to a violent clan of moonshiners, Cory
must confront the secrets that hide in the shadows of his hometown -- for his
father's sanity and his own life hang in the balance....
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
Sussex, England. A middle-aged
man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he
lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where,
when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and
her mother and grandmother. He hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as
he sits by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean) behind the
ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is
a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone,
let alone a small boy.
Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car
at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a
touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways. The darkness was unleashed,
something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. And
Lettie—magical, comforting, wise beyond her years—promised to protect him, no
matter what.
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
A carnival rolls in sometime after the midnight hour on a chill Midwestern October eve, ushering in Halloween a week before its time. A calliope's shrill siren song beckons to all with a seductive promise of dreams and youth regained. In this season of dying, Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show has come to Green Town, Illinois, to destroy every life touched by its strange and sinister mystery. And two inquisitive boys standing precariously on the brink of adulthood will soon discover the secret of the satanic raree-show's smoke, mazes, and mirrors, as they learn all too well the heavy cost of wishes - and the stuff of nightmare.
