Skeleton Crew

This is my favorite horror book of all time. I've had this copy since the mid 1980s, and it still holds up. It's cracked and worn now, but every time I open it, I get the same spook and the same hairs standing up on my arms.

"The Raft" is the one that gets me most. I don't know exactly how it happened, but reading that story pulled me straight out of reality and into Stephen King's world. Stephen must be one of the best writers ever to do that to a reader's mind. I felt like I was actually there on the floating raft, staring at that black whirling thing in the water with the other characters. One by one, they disappeared into it, until only one person was left. Then it just went poof, and I snapped back to reality. That was the moment I remembered none of it was real. Just a story.

"Mrs. Todd's Shortcut" was a good one too. Her shortcuts get her to a destination in fewer miles than a straight line between the two points, which shouldn't be possible in reality. Something happens to her because of it. I won't say what. You'd have to find that out yourself.

"Word Processor of the Gods" got me as well. The idea that a word processor could somehow affect reality was terrifying to think about. What really pulled me in was the detail that it ran off an aging HO train transformer. I'm into model railroads, so that small detail hooked me right away. A fanatic horror story, in the best way.

Even writing this right now, just thinking about the stories in this book, I've got goosebumps. That's forty years of the same reaction from one book. Not many things do that to me.