I Want to Drink Your Blood

Day 262 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and a young woman who has already read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is now reading Bram Stoker's Dracula, because she wanted something scary for a long train ride a few days before Halloween.

But look at the cheerful yellow of the cover of the first edition of Dracula!  Nothing too scary there.

As I recall, though, it scared the bejeezus out of one of my friends who was reading it late at night.  (What is the bejeezus?  Oh, a curse.)

By coincidence (and the coincidence of Halloween) Dracula is the book recommended on Facebook this week by Goodreads.  They are showing an ebook version.

Sort of elegant scary cover there:

I was in the play version of Dracula in high school, as Lucy, and somewhere there is a picture of--uh oh, I found it!--me fainting into the arms of...an old boyfriend as Dracula.  What I had forgotten was another picture of me about to bite the neck of poor, innocent Harker.  And Curt, there you are with wild hair as Renfield, eating a fly.

High school yearbooks are very, very scary.

I remember being truly chilled by In Cold Blood, reading it in a farmhouse way too similar to the one in Holcomb, Kansas.  And, in second grade, scaring myself by reading stories in an Alfred Hitchcock anthology when my parents were out and we had a babysitter who couldn't really comfort me.

What's a book that scared you?