We asked the BuzzFeed Community for their favorite creepy lines in literature. Here are the spine-tingling results.
1. "I kissed her, a long hard kiss. Because baby didn't know it, but baby was dead, and in a way I couldn't have loved her more."
—Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me
Suggested by emmas43
2. "Wendy? Darling? Light, of my life. I'm not gonna hurt ya. I'm just going to bash your brains in."
Suggested by iambe87
3. "I thought Mr. Clutter was a very nice gentleman. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat."
—Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
Suggested by Giudetta Li-Anna Rizzuti, Facebook
4. "At the same time my eye caught my hand, thin so that it looked like a dirty skin-purse full of loose bones..."
—H.G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau
Suggested by kristak3
6. "Here is a small fact: You are going to die."
—Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
Suggested by lisak4
7. "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."
—Dante, Inferno
Suggested by Lauren Blehm, Facebook
8. "Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: 'Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.' That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday."
—Albert Camus, The Stranger
Suggested by caitlinm18
9. "No live organism can continue for long to exist under conditions of absolute reality."
—Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
Suggested by Jim Young, Facebook
11. "Mr. Croup began to laugh. It sounded like a piece of blackboard being dragged over the nails of a wall of severed fingers."
—Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere
Suggested by mokie
12. "I felt lethal, on the verge of frenzy. My nightly bloodlust overflowed into my days and I had to leave the city. My mask of sanity was a victim of impending slippage."
—Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho
Suggested by punchandpie
13. "...I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together.
There she stands
As if alive."
—Robert Browning, My Last Duchess
Suggested by moiras4
14. "'Everything down here floats,' that chuckling, rotten voice whispered..."
—Stephen King, It
Suggested by whatadickens
16. "But no animal escapes the cruel knife in the end."
—George Orwell, Animal Farm
Suggested by sarabri
17. “And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity.”
—Stephen King, Pet Sematary
Suggested by Samantha Vinson, Facebook
18. "On the butcher's-block counter, the severed hands were still poised on the rolling pin. She half-expected them to skitter suddenly across the counter as if they were two crabs."
—Dean Koontz, Phantoms
Suggested by lizard333
19. "I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her. No pain felt she..."
—Robert Browning, Porphyria's Lover
Suggested by heatherrf20
21. "Until everything topples, we have no idea what we actually have, how precariously and perfectly it all hangs together."
—Blake Crouch, Dark Matter
Suggested by lindscee
22. "Like one, that on a lonely road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turn'd round, walks on
And turns no more his head..."
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Suggested by stephanief4
23. "‘You are the dead,’ repeated the iron voice."
—George Orwell, 1984
Suggested by laurenc
24. "He is laughing, at me, at this pain. I've not met anyone like him. I know now how Mickey felt when he met me. This is a monster in the flesh of a man."
—Pierce Brown, Red Rising
Suggested by kellyb4
26. "With trembling fingers, I prised open the front of the upright coffin, with its
sculpted face caught in a rictus of pain. Then, overcome, I dropped the key I still held in my other hand. It dropped into the forming pool of her blood."
—Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber
Suggested by estratton453
27. "'I swear it on my own mother's grave.'
'Does she have a grave?' asked Coraline.
'Oh yes,' said the other mother. 'I put her in there myself. And when I found her trying to crawl out, I put her back.'"
—Neil Gaiman, Coraline
Suggested by fizzabelleluna
28. "Chanted loudly, chanted lowly
Till her blood was frozen slowly
And her eyes were darken'd wholly."
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Lady of Shalott
Suggested by rsmith8235
