I wasn't allowed to watch scary films as a child. My Dad, liberal in most things, adhered obsessively to the British Board of Film Classifications' decisions – PG was OK; 12 was beyond the pale and probably illegal, even when I was 11. This was perhaps just as well, as I was neurotic enough to suffer weeks of nightmares after illicitly watching Gremlins, or even the shrieky red-eyed bit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. On the literary front, the gruesome horror bricks of Messrs King and Herbert didn't enter my orbit until I was old enough to visit the library independently or buy them for myself. But this didn't stop me having my days-of-the-week pants scared off on a regular basis – it just tended to happen at the hands of more canonical authors, clad in deceptively tasteful jackets.
Dad liked Dover Thrift editions himself, and would buy them for me without question (they were also pocket-money-friendly in the days when my weekly dole was £1, which had to cover sweets as well). Cover images rich in killer dolls and bloodied fonts would no doubt have rung his alarm bells, but I was just as terrified by Sheridan Le Fanu's Green Tea and Other Ghost Stories which haunted me with the conviction that a spectral monkey, "frantic and reviling", lived in my bedroom and glared at me nocturnally out of red eyes (by day they changed back into the inoffensive digits of my radio alarm clock, to avoid discovery).
An Edgar Allan Poe anthology, The Gold-Bug and Other Stories, which contained The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-tale Heart and The Pit and the Pendulum, came in a classy green and black marbled wrapper which failed to alert dad to its perturbing contents. Or else he thought the tortures of the Inquisition and the murder and dismemberment of a vulture-eyed senior citizen ("A tub had caught all – ha, ha!") was amply compensated for by the master of the macabre's dark romantic prose. Either way they still scared the bejesus out of me.
There were also innumerable children's writers who regularly made my little heart go pitter-pat, with Roald Dahl out in front – to this day I remain wary of sleeping with the window open, lest the Fleshlumpeater or the Bloodbottler reach in, horny-handed, to extract and devour me after dark. Joan Aiken shared the ability of Saki and MR James to invest ordinary situations with extraordinary terrors – beaded bazaar-work snakes that attack in dreams, resented siblings who metamorphose into creatures of terror – and Jan Pienkowski's lurid, gorgeous silhouettes made his stories appallingly memorable. Robert Westall was also a towering figure, not only as master of the spectral short story, but as author of The Scarecrows, one of the most frightening novels I have ever read. Everyone should read this book, and then never go near a mill, a field or a straw man again.
Dahl, Aiken and Westall didn't have round red brands on their covers to warn off the hawk-eyed parent or the timorous child – in fact, the amiable little Puffin treacherously ameliorated any such fears – but lordy, they packed a punch. I should make it clear here that I'm not arguing for age-ratings on books or banners to warn the youthful reader that "some mild threat" lurks within. In fact, I treasure the memories of having been frightened so comprehensively by masterfully understated writing and the netted-fish thrashings of my own imagination, especially when I didn't know it was coming. To this day I can't think of a better occupation for a winter's night, preferably a dark and stormy one with a gale rattling the shutters, than settling down with an eye-wideningly frightening book.
Which authors frightened you as a child? Was it the stuff written for kids, or adult writing you read young? Are there any well-remembered phrases which still accelerate your pulse or books you have the uneasy compulsion to turn face-to-the-wall?
