13 Of The Creepiest Book Quotes Ever

Halloween is right around the corner, and what’s Halloween without a little (or a lot) of creepy? So, let the haunted houses, creepy movie marathons, and scary pranks from your evil prankster friends begin! Right? Right.

But for the hardcore Halloween junkies (Halloweeners?) you might be looking for a more long-term scare. Well, you don’t have to make the rounds at your local haunted houses everyday for a month, or hire someone to switch off the circuit breaker in the basement every 10 minutes while you try to watch all five Resident Evils, just to sustain a decent level of creepy for the Halloween season. That’s what books are for.

Nothing sustains a scare better than building up all the suspense and eerie over the course of 300 pages. And nothing sends you back instantly in the deep dark land of scary quicker than the creepy quotes from some of those seriously scary novels. So, if you find yourself suddenly low on adrenaline or sleeping soundly in the night this Halloween season, it shouldn’t take more than a few of these scary quotes to make your heart drop into the pit of your stomach every time the house creaks or your cat suddenly appears in the doorway.

“Denn die Todten reiten schnell (For the dead travel fast)”

— Bram Stoker, Dracula via Gottfried August Bürger’s “Lenore”

“I tried to make meat loaf out of the girl but it becomes too frustrating a task and instead I spend the afternoon smearing her meat all over the walls, chewing on strips of skin I ripped from her body”

― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti”

― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“I am your number one fan.”

― Stephen King, Misery

“God! Whose hand was I holding?”

― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.”

― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

“No answer still. I thrust a torch through the remaining aperture and let it fall within. There came forth in return only a jingling of the bells. My heart grew sick; it was the dampness of the catacombs that made it so.”

— Edgar Allen Poe, "The Cask of Amontillado"

“Wendy? Darling? Light, of my life. I'm not gonna hurt ya. I'm just going to bash your brains in.”

— Stephen King, The Shining

“Vampires, real vampires, didn't nibble on the necks of nubile young virgins. They tore people to pieces and sucked the blood out of the chunks. ”

― David Wellington, 99 Coffins

As I start walking,I try to remember wherePeople like to hide.

— Ryan Mecum, Zombie Haiku

“Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair.”

—William Faulkner, A Rose For Emily

“Some teeth long for ripping, gleaming wet from black dog gums. So you keep your eyes closed at the end. You don't want to see such a mouth up close. before the bite, before its oblivion in the goring of your soft parts, the speckled lips will curl back in a whinny of excitement. You just know it.”

― Adam Nevill, The Ritual

And maybe just one more, in case you've got a thing about the number 13...

“We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones”

—Stephen King, Danse Macabre

Because what’s scarier than that?

Image: Janneke Cobb/flickr