Ray Bradbury/Nightmare Fuel

• The Ray Bradbury short story There Will Come Soft Rains describes the activities of an automated house, long since abandoned but still running on its programming. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that humanity was destroyed in a nuclear war at some point in the past (there is a reference to children's shadows burned into a wall). The house still runs, until it finally succumbs to decay at the end, but nobody will ever live there again. The title refers to a poem about how life will continue even after the end of humanity; the story basically says, "Not if we screw things up first". Haunting. (Incidentally the story can be read online here.
  • The most disturbing part of the whole story: The only living thing you see during the whole story is the family's dog, returning home to die from radiation sickness and starvation. Every man, woman and child should be forced to read this story. Do that, and it's a safe bet that the only place we will be launching any nukes will be straight into the sun.
    • What about seeing the silhouettes burnt into the wall of the house, showing just where the people were when the bomb went off? In particular, you get this set of silhouettes, showing a boy, a girl, both of them adorable, and the ball that they had been tossing between them. Jesus H God that's a depressing bit.
    • Apparently this actually happened IRL in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
    • That's the stuff of my real nightmares, having been there in person several years ago. You never forget that, just seeing how some kid was sitting cross-legged and then vaporized.
    • The Russian animated adaptation of the story makes it worse. The house, instead of seeming maternal and friendly, looks and sounds like it would kill you at any given second. The family's fate is more gruesome. Instead of having their silhouettes burned into the side of the house, they were burned to ash while sleeping in their beds. The robot unknowingly dumps the family's ashes on the floor when it tries to wake them up.
    • Not to mention the voice of the house...dear god, the voice...
      • Tellingly, that adaptation also leaves out the following lines from the poem:

Not one would know of the war, not one
Would care at last when it was done.

• • • TI had to read the short story collection/novel (it's hard to tell which it is) "The Martian Chronicles" when I was twelve. Most of the stories were good, fascinating, and occasionally disturbing, but nonetheless good. Then I read that one. It remains one of the most frightening things I have ever read.
  • Lots of Ray Bradbury stories fall into this category, esp if they've been made into Twilight Zone episodes, for example, "The Elevator", "The Burning Man"... For example, in one of the short stories in Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles-- Usher II-- the guy re-enacts various Edgar Allen Poe stories.
  • Also, his short story Usher II, in which all the guests at a party are executed in various gruesome ways (one is stuffed up a chimney by a gorilla) while their robot replicas watch on, thus assuring that none of the guests know what is happening until their own downfall.
  • In the After Dark series, there are PLENTY of Nightmare Fuel, which often lead me not to read the books at all. As well as the chilling stories, the black and white gruesome illustrations didn't help one bit! One of them involved a school-girl for a school project, learns about how Cod Liver can help halt aging, so she feeds them to her parents... And they start de-evolving to primates, and then just when you think it was over... HER BABY SISTER who was fed cod earlier, starts to de-evolves too! AAAHHH! Another story, Bread from Heaven had an atheist boy called Jacob in an over-religious town (who worship UFOS as miracles from heaven), reject tradition... At the end of the story, he was dissected by the aliens... Brain Bleach
    • And "Skeleton", a story about a man who developed a phobia of his own skeleton, especially his 'teeth. His freaking teeth. Worse yet, his skeleton started to hate him, and in the end, deserted him...
    • Did you read the wrong story? His skeleton doesn't leave voluntarily: In the end, he visits a HORRIBLE man who is implied to be some sort of inhuman monster and VOLUNTARILY has his skeleton SUCKED OUT OF HIM.
    • Not only that, but his skeleton is then eaten by the monster.
  • "The Small Assassin". It's a short story about a new father who believes his child is fully aware, fully mobile, and killing things; he tries to involve the doctors who treat him as if these are insane ramblings despite mounting evidence that the father is actually right. Eventually the doctor starts to believe the father. The story includes such immortal lines as:

Doctor: See, baby? Something bright, something pretty ...
A scalpel.

• • "The Watchers" is probably one of the most terrifying things ever penned. In it, the narrator's friend, having feared animals all his life, finally discovers that animals are actually helpers created by God, whereas bacteria are the real evil creatures. Having discovered this, he starts to be eaten alive before he can tell anyone, takes a boiling-hot shower in a futile attempt to save himself, then wildly drives his car into a ditch. The narrator, seeing his corpse, sets the car on fire, and afterwards is typing out the discovery on his typewriter. The last paragraph or so is a terrifying account of the various germs slowly destroying him from the inside. The story ends with a line of typed gibberish as his eaten-away body fails and presumably falls onto the typewriter. I had trouble even THINKING about germs for a long while after that.
  • The October Game. "Then ... some idiot turned on the lights."
  • "Zero Hour"
    • "Peek a Boo" That's just creepy.
  • Bradbury's "Kaleidoscope" involves a rocket being punctured by an asteroid, and the entire crew -- in spacesuits -- blown into space. They had air, but were all helplessly drifting away from each other, and they were discussing which planet or asteroid they would eventually drift into the gravity well of.
  • "The Veldt", where an animatronic playroom actually came to life and lions devoured the parents of two seemingly indifferent children. God, the images. What makes the The Veldt all the more nightmarish is that the children weren't even disturbed by their parents' deaths, and that they seemed to have been planning the whole death of their parents all this time. The screams they heard in the playroom turned out to be the screams of the simulated versions of the parents! And when read today, it's even creepier than when it was originally published, as it's so reminiscent of the alleged effects of violent video games on the minds of young children.
  • "The City", a terrifying short story where an artificially created city captures a spaceship full of men, drags them underground, graphically disembowels them with razors, and rebuilds them as zombie robots.
  • I once read a similar story in an anthology. It involved two children who enjoyed Sherlock Holmes. In the middle of reading The Hound of the Baskervilles, their parents told them it was time for bed and took the book away. The children, as they go to sleep, use some sort of psychic power to make the actual hound come out of the book and maul their parents. They then come downstairs in the morning, find their parent's horribly disfigured bodies, and concern themselves with nothing but finding out where the book is hidden.
  • In yet another version of the 'things come to life', a short story Hush! concerns a busy babysitter who tells her client (who has a perchance for Imaginary Friend) to create a creature to keep him silent. Said creature is a vacuum-cleaner monster (which sucks the noises out of objects)... The situation doesn't sound THAT terrifying until the Imaginary Friend completely sucks the sounds (and air) out of the babysitter while she is calling the police- and then the monster strangles both her and the client in its cold coils... Then the monster escapes and silence finally falls... Or is it? Huuussshh!
  • "The Whole Town's Sleeping"; a story about a single woman walking home alone in a town terrorized by a murderer called 'The Lonely One'. As if reading through her hand-twistingly tense night-time trek home (through a ravine!) wasn't bad enough, she believes she hears someone following her. She arrives home safe and sound and chastises herself for being so silly as to believe she was being followed, when she hears, in the dark living room behind her, someone clear his throat.
    • According to various Afterwords in the author's works, The Lonely One was real and did kill a few women in Bradbury's hometown when he was a boy.
    • He continues that story in Dandelion Wine where some nearby children watch the police pull a body from the house...then lament that the woman had killed him with a nearby pair of scissors instead of letting him get away because it was just so much fun with a serial killer loose in the town. Thank you Bradbury, for making a happy ending just as disturbing as a bad one.
  • And "The Emissary", oh god, "The Emissary". A bedridden boy's dog goes out each day to find things for him, and one day leads a young teacher to the house, who befriends him and becomes his tutor. But then she dies unexpectedly, and his dog vanishes for several weeks. Then his dog returns very late one night, covered in deep, worm-ridden dirt, his paws bleeding from days of non-stop digging. And then there's a shadow at the bedroom door, a voice calls his name, and the story ends with "Martin had company".
  • "Fever Dream" - Body Horror meets And I Must Scream meets Cassandra Truth.
  • "Jack in the Box". Gorgeous, happy descriptions of... ohnothat'ssowrong! And the little boy being overjoyed when he finds out he's 'dead'.
  • "A Sound of Thunder". Who knew a butterfly could cause the Third Reich to win World War 2?
  • The October Game A man goes crazy and kills his little daughter at her Halloween party. Then he turns out the lights and passes the head around, and meanwhile all the kids are trying to figure out what happened to the little girl and the mom is freaking out and screaming for no one to turn the lights back on. The last line is "...and then, some idiot turned on the lights." And what makes it worse is that the man hasn't gone crazy--his wife, who didn't give him the son he wanted and who adores their only daughter, doesn't love him. He kills the child as punishment for his wife...to take away the thing she loves best in the entire world.