Let’s Talk Bookish: Horror

This week’s Let’s Talk Bookish question comes from Dani at Literary Lion who asks:

Can Books Be Effective Horror?

I don’t really like horror. I have seen fewer than a dozen horror movies in my life and I don’t read horror, really, at all. However, I do read mystery/thrillers and if the icy dread I feel virtually tracking a serial killer on the loose is any indication, then, yes. Books can be very effective horror.

I have a friend who writes a horror blog who tells me all the time that there are things that Lovecraft wrote that will never translate onto the screen as effectively because the terror in the books renders people actually insane, which is something that a movie can’t replicate.

I don’t know about that, but I do know that in 2011, my late husband was out of town on a work trip when I decided to read Michael Connelly’s The Poet. I called him in Nova Scotia at one point to inform him that I was sure that the Poet was in his closet and made him stay on the phone with me while I checked.

Seemed pretty effective to me.