Connect! Unite! Act! ATTN: DC, Tucson, Seattle & Boston Meet-ups! +Q: Scariest Book You Ever Read?

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What's the Scariest Book You Ever Read?

As a kid I would read anything I could get my hands on, sampling the adult bookshelf far more often than was good for my developing psyche. A frightening adult book and a child's vivid imagination can be a bad combination, and a lifelong fear of going absolutely and unexpectedly out of my mind was hatched while reading The Snake Pit one summer.

Puzzlingly,The Snake Pit didn't seem to be about snakes at all, and started off in a confusing, disjointed fashion. Virginia, a young midwestern journalist, is sitting on a park bench in New York next to a yammering stranger, annoyed at her husband's lateness and with no memory of how she got there. The disorganization of the first chapter mirrored the fog in Virginia's mind, though flashes of her wit and sarcasm kept me reading on. Later, as she's herded inside an institutional building with dozens of other women, it gradually becomes clear that she is in a circa 1940's asylum, surrounded by people who seem far worse off than she is in her fugue state. As Virginia meets with her doctor she pieces together her past history -- her dead fiance, her husband Robert, and the sudden moment when she grabs onto the bedroom dresser and says, "Robert, I think there's something the matter with my head." From there she suddenly wakes up to the nightmare of Juniper Hill Hospital, where's she subjected to the myriad and terrifying "treatments" of the day, including being forced to undergo electroshock therapy.

The book made it sound to a nervous kid as if you could be going along just fine when suddenly you'd get a bad headache, and as a result get locked up, restrained and tortured for no discernible reason. That's powerfully scary stuff.

Scarier yet was the parallel to our own local boogeyman, the notorious Patton State Hospital, known simply to the locals as Patton. The word Patton conjured up threats of involuntary incarceration, howling lunatics, gothic tortures, straight jackets and sedation. Patton was what your older siblings threatened you with; what neighbors muttered about your family's eventual outcome.

You keep being a bad girl and you're going to end up in Patton.

If your dad doesn't quit drinking so much they're gonna throw him in Patton.

Patton State Hospital, circa 1900 when it was named the Southern California State Asylum for the Insane and Inebriates.

The threat of being tossed into Patton for a wide variety of perceived misbehaviors actually wasn't too far-fetched in the 30's and 40's and had the ring of plausibility. Being a bad, disobedient girl could indeed get you put away:

Afflictions fell into two categories: moral and physical.

So-called moral afflictions qualifying for admission to Patton included religious excitement and spiritualism, mental strain, worry, overwork and love affairs, including seduction.

The physical category was four times as long. Among its listings were alcoholism, drug and tobacco abuse, privation and overwork, change of life and old age.

I worried about "going crazy" for years, worrying that madness would descend on me with a bright flash of light and a splitting headache like the stroke my Papa suffered, throwing me into a Dickensian nightmare. It's not hard to see now how those fears reflected the instability and sheer craziness of growing up with a brilliant but erratic alcoholic father who would periodically disappear for days or even weeks at a time. There was no monster, vampire, or ghost that scared me more than the idea that some day I, too, might lose it and destroy everything I loved.

A few years ago I saw the 1948 movie version of The Snake Pit with Olivia de Havilland, which considerably changed the plot and in no way captured the intense fear evoked by the prospect of suddenly "losing your mind" and finding yourself locked up in Patton. But isn't our youthful imagination a far more frightening place than that of any Hollywood movie?

What was the scariest book you read as a kid?

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