With All Hallows’ Eve looming,  OnBuy.com thought it would be the perfect time to unleash their latest study* – and it has two SPOOKTACULAR parts.

Part 1 – The Most Terrifying  Classic  Books of All Time, According to Reviews!

OnBuy.com trawled through thousands of books and associated reviews on Goodreads and Google to unveil the 10 most terrifying  classic  books of all time.

In first place we find Stephen King’s  The Shining  – with over  18,000 reviews  comprising the words scary, terrifying, and frightening! Followed by iconic novels from King, such as  Misery  (11,120 reviews)  and  Salem’s Lot  (10,430)  in second and third place, respectively.

While Netflix fans won’t be surprised to find Shirley Jackson’s  The Haunting of Hill House  in 6th place!

OnBuy.com scraped Goodreads and Google to find out how many times the selected books were linked to keywords like “scary”, “terrifying”, and “frightening”!

Next, OnBuy.com compiled a list of ‘modern horror’ books by scraping lists found on Goodreads and Google. Only the highest-rated books as well as the ones with the most reviews were chosen.  ‘Modern horror to tingle your spine’, ‘modern horror better than Stephen King’ and ‘terrifying books that scared authors’ were some of the lists included. Only books with the highest ratings and reviews were chosen for the study (at least 10,000 ratings, at least three stars on Goodreads, and at least 2,000 individual reviews).

Finally, for the second part of the study, selected books (released in the last 20 years), with the highest ratings and reviews, were passed on to 603 book fans to take part in a trial. Over the course of six months, participating book fans were asked to wear a heart rate tracker while reading the fifteen books for the first time. Respondents were asked to start the monitoring app as soon as they started reading the book, and to switch off as soon as they put the book down.