I still won't walk near or park near a sewer grate. Fuck you, Pennywise.

He wrote another similar book later, but it was WAY over-the-top gory that I just couldn't get into it at all, and had to put it aside.

"It" has already been mentioned.

The first book I read all the way through without putting it down. Creepy.

but "Christian Nation," as described in a thread above, sounds apt.

No other Stephen King story comes close.

The UK's Ramsay Campbell has written numerous short stories that are highly effective at being creepy and shocking, the best collection IMO being "Dark Companions".

For whatever reason, I find older stories to be more effective at scaring me, maybe because when you read Poe or Lovecraft, you need to adjust your mind to accommodate the old-fashioned manner of narrating a story in English, and so since you're already making that accommodation, it's easier to make other accommodations and suspend disbelief further than with modern ghost stories.

For example, some older mystery books can be very creepy without a single gruesome episode, whereas modern stories go into great graphic detail about dismembering corpses and flaying body parts, etc., which is disgusting, but scary? No, not really, just disgusting.

It's a short story that appeared in the Dark Forces collection from 1980, and is probably my favorite-ever short story. It's quite long, and just such a pleasure to read, like a favorite armchair, which is a weird thing to say about horror, but just try reading it and you'll see what I mean.

The Haunting of Hill House.

And just about anything H.P. Lovecraft wrote.

He was writing in the generation before H.P. Lovecraft, and he has a lot of that vibe. I read The Great God Pan, and it was quite creepy and entertaining.

Could be the scariest story ever written...

I'll need to look for it.

Just waiting for some free time to finally read it.

The original classic. Always sends a chill down my back.