Everyone likes a good horror movie, even if they say they don’t, and the best horror movies often start out as novels. Of course, they don’t always seem much like the novels when they are finished, and the novels are always much scarier because a good movie lives in the eyes and the ears. A great horror film lives in the pulse rate and the hairs on the back of your neck. But a great horror novel lives in the imagination, in the dark corners of your mind, and that my dear readers, is a far scarier place in which to dwell. So here are some quotes, from novels, novelists and, just this once, form the odd movie, to put the chill back in your spine. So to quote pinhead…

“Alone. Yes, that’s the keyword, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn’t hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym.” ~ Stephen King

“Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we’re opened, we’re red.”~ Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volumes One to Three

“There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand.” ~ Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.” ~ H.P. Lovecraft, The Outsider

“Even if she be not harmed, her heart may fail her in so much and so many horrors; and hereafter she may suffer–both in waking, from her nerves, and in sleep, from her dreams.” ~ Bram Stoker, Dracula

“I think perhaps all of us go a little crazy at times.” ~ Robert Bloch, Psycho

“Reality is shaped by the forces that destroy it.” ~ D. Harlan Wilson, The Kyoto Man

“All fled—all done, so lift me on the pyre—The Feast is over, and the lamps expire.” ~ Robert E. Howard

“To be thoroughly conversant with Man’s heart, is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of Despair” ~ Edgar Allan Poe

“What looked like morning was the beginning of endless night” ~ William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist

“I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, she thought, and the monster feels my tiny little movements inside.” ~ Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“Broad daylight does not encourage the apprehension of horror.” ~ Guy de Maupassant

“On the morning of the exorcism, I stayed home from school.” ~ Paul Tremblay, A Head Full of Ghosts

“Dreading dusk, fearing night, praying for dawn.” ~ Gregory J. Saunders

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” ~ Stanley Kubrick

And finally, as I am quoting horror, there are parts of Passing Place which people don’t like to read late at night. So a quote of my own…