Despite really being one of the most versatile writers of all time, Stephen King is usually regarded as the “King of Horror”, pardon the pun.   And certainly Mr King can write blood-curdling yarns.   However the scariest story he has ever told in print was not one of his novels, and not one of his short stories.   Rather it was an episode in his mid 1980s non-fiction book, “Danse Macabre”.

Obviously I cannot quote this episode without Mr King’s permission; however, I can legally paraphrase it.   So here’s the gist of his account: In the late 1950s Stephen King, who lives in Maine, was in the cinema as a child watching a movie, when suddenly the film was stopped and the manager walked out onto the stage looking very ashen-faced.   Almost crying himself, the manager told them that the Soviet Union (for those less than about twenty-eight years old, take this to mean Russia) had just successfully sent a satellite Sputnik-1 into orbit around the Earth.   Since this was October 1957, and I was born January 31 1957, I have no personal memory of Sputnik-1.   But if it had happened a decade later, and in 1967 I had been watching a film at the cinema and the manager had come in to announce this great scientific achievement, I would have done what any sane child (especially one who loves science as I do) would have done.   I would have stood up and cheered loudly, “Three cheers for Sputnik-1!   Hip hip…!”

But the horror of Stephen King’s telling was that in redneck Maine, the paranoia of cold war Soviet Bashing was so extreme, that the children all began crying in fear at the Soviet Union’s momentous achievement.

Okay that is by far the scariest story Stephen King has ever had published, now let me see if I am capable of topping it:

Okay let us start in deepest, darkest Africa.   In the 1990s a young Australian couple were touring Africa when they discovered the true danger of the gross false advertising that all tourist boards the world over engage in.   By finding out the hard way that the entire African nation had been lying to the rest of the world for over a hundred years by not warning us about the most dangerous animal in Africa.