With so many terror stories to pick from, for this reader, the best of the bunch is very close to home.
Stephen King’s son Joe Hill says this book by his dad is the scariest one of all time
Joe Hill has read enough horror to know true fear when he sees it. The bestselling author behind King Sorrow has spent his career crafting monsters of his own, but when asked which story chills him the most, his mind went straight back to his father’s library.
Hill had plenty of candidates in dad Stephen King’s catalogue: The Shining with its haunted hotel and unraveling mind, Pet Sematary with its unbearable grief, or Misery, a masterclass in claustrophobic terror. Yet one book, he says, stands above the rest.
What is Stephen King’s scariest horror?
“That’s the gold standard when it comes to scaring the pants off people,” Hill said to USA Today. “No one’s ever going to touch that.”
The novel he’s referring to is It, King’s 1986 epic about a group of children in the small town of Derry, Maine, who band together to confront an ancient evil that resurfaces every generation. The creature, taking the form of a clown called Pennywise, feeds on fear – and on the children themselves. As adults, they return decades later to finish what they started, realizing that the terror never truly left them or their hometown.
Hill believes It redefined the horror genre by mixing cosmic dread with the intimacy of childhood trauma. “The classics – Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – were written in a more conservative time,” he said. “People didn’t go for the throat the way my dad went for the throat in It.”
According to Hill, Pennywise now stands alongside Dracula and Frankenstein as one of fiction’s enduring nightmares. “People are still going to be scared of Pennywise in a hundred years,” he said, proof that sometimes the scariest stories really do run in the family.
USA Today spoke to Hill and other horror authors about their recommendations.
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