How Fiction Can Scare You

Have you ever heard people say reading a book isn’t scary? It doesn’t have jump scares, the eerie music or the visuals that a movie has. Well read on and learn the several ways books can be scary.

• You can grow so attached to a character in a book as you have more time and hear their thoughts that you fear anything will happen to them.
• The book can be realistic or have realistic themes which means you dread if it’s going to have the same ending. For example Sarah Pinborough’s Death House is about ill kids being left in isolation in a sanatorium style house till they mutate and are killed. That’s quite realistic.
• A book can gross you out and make you shiver as you hear the intricate detail of the brutal deaths.
• A book can be an analogy for a huge fear like Dracula is for foreigners or Logan’s Run for overpopulation.
• You can be scared by reading depending on when and where you read it as your memories and surroundings shape your interpretation.
• Reading fires up your imagination and something trivial like the tree by your window could turn into something more.

So there’s my view on how books can be scary, what’s yours?