What have your scariest moments been in a book?

It’s 200 years since unceasing storms sweeping over Lake Geneva ruined Mary Shelley’s sailing jaunts and gave birth to a literary genre – when Lord Byron suggested to her and the other guests at the Villa Diodati that they pass some time by writing ghost stories. To celebrate the birth of Victor Frankenstein’s monster, the Royal Society of Literature has been asking fellows to reveal their scariest moments in literature. 

For Hilary Mantel, it’s the moment in Jane Eyre when Rochester pauses outside a locked door in the dark, low corridor of Thornfield Hall’s fateful third storey and asks: “You don’t turn sick at the sight of blood?” He leaves Jane locked into an attic room – complete with antique tapestry and a cabinet decorated with the 12 apostles, “an ebon Crucifix and a dying Christ” – where she must tend to a wounded man, dipping her hand again and again into a basin that gradually becomes a mixture of blood and water. As a 10-year-old reader, Mantel says she “didn’t know that if your name is in the title, you can’t die part way through the book. I doubted Jane would make it to see ‘streaks of grey light edging the window curtains’. But dawn comes – and we still don’t know who or what is beyond the wall." 

Adam Foulds, by contrast, declares himself unmoved by the “special effects department of the gothic imagination”. It is people and “what they can do to each other” that he finds truly terrifying. He cites a moment in Denis Johnson’s Angels when Jamie is being drugged and abused by two men, and – through her eyes – we see a knife. “I’ve never been more desperate to read on to know that a character survives,” Foulds says, “or, for that matter, to tear into a fictional world to rescue someone"...