A difficult question to answer. I rarely get scared at all, by novels or movies. I have camped enough in dark forests too. I would like to be more easily scareable though. Perhaps I'm so logical as a reader that I tend to rationalize everything that I come across. But horror, as a term, can include so many different emotions and combinations of them that I sure must have been horrorized some time. Some books give you the curious disgust (no horror here for me) and some for example, a weird kind of oppressive anxiousness ('The Shining'). Often the most scariest books are the ones that aren't horror books at all, genrewise. Horror really is a complicated and hard thing to achieve. For me anyways, and for many people that have been exposed to it from a young age. In some horror books you can sense the build up and you somehow prepare yourself to what's coming. You automatically accustom yourself with the style and the set. That 'prepare to be scared' -style sometimes takes away all the suspense. Sometimes it really isn't what you expected but that still doesn't always mean true horror. I have watched horror movies since I was a child. My father was a horror enthusiast of a kind. I remember when he always made sure that I couldn't see anything that would give me nightmares so he always told me to leave the room when something graphic was about to happen (movies that he had seen before). I was always so thrilled to do this. My imagination probably made those scenes more scary than what they would've been otherwise. I had a deep affinity to horror genre from there on. When I grew up, I owned a part of my life especially to horror movies. So as to say, I have a strong toleration to horror. Usually horror, for me, means curious awe.
Ghosts, monsters, haunted places and possessed things... meh. Unknown things with unknown purposes... count me scared. This is the number one reason I'm a huge fan of anything extra terrestrial (mostly movies). I also have a weird interest on the body-mind connection; the transmutations, weird symptoms and physical modifications by the human mind. A.k.a body/biological horror. Although not a very good example of body horror, I remember Greg Bear's 'Blood Music' giving me some creeps in its disturbingly plausible-like descriptions of nano-bots and human existence. Once again, not a horror book.
Last time I had to put on the lights in the middle of the night was when I was reading King's 'Insomnia', which is not a particularly scary book either, most definitely a King novel but... but one scene took me totally by surprise and it pulled the rug from under my imagination in its unexpectedly otherworldly strangeness.
The most recent book that had my mind wondering into worlds that truly left my mind to be f**ked by something I still can't name, was Thomas Ligotti's 'Songs of a Dead Dreamer'. The concepts seemed to have no bottoms at all. From time to time I took a break from reading and my imagination went to places where, for small spirallic moments, I could feel truly alone and abandoned. Places with neverending time and over-imaginative, unknown, overpowered evil. Places that were part of something that you could not ever understand. The reader was left vulnerable with a series of questions about the possible qualities of existence and different kinds of realities. Is it possible to think about things that could not happen in our reality? Is the human mind more vivid than anything that could be encountered in all the dimensions in our universe?
But thought-provoking prose or a sudden burst of blood on the protagonists face, I am on a constant quest to scare myself by books.
