Whats the first book that seriously scared you?

[Sundae]

The first one I can remember the title for is Stranger With my Face - Lois Duncan (who also wrote I know What You Did Last Summer which I also read). I was 12. There's a part where she looks in the mirror and it's not her face looking back (I think her reflection is smiling) and it terrified me.

Prior to that was a book called something like The House of the Four Winds, but not the one I can see on Amazon. I asked my Mum, "What does severed mean?" and when Mum asked the context replied something like, "Looked up to see the blood dripping from a newly severed head" she took the book away from me. I got it back in the end, but the part that scared me wasn't the decapitation, it was the malevolent servants and the secret twin.

As a teen, The Shining terrified me. I've always been more scared by the dark inside houses rather than outside. The Shining scared me so much I held it away from me to turn the pages because I was physically scared of the book. Fantastic.

ETA (after reading Cloud) LOTR did scare me - but it was a good scariness. Fog on the Barrow Downs was wonderfully creepy.