Books that make the flesh creep.

An anthology of eleven spooky stories "for fearless readers of ten upwards" is being devoured by an eight year old boy. 
The book in question is Alfred Hitchcock's Ghostly Gallery. That boy, me.  
I have a vague memory of a Puffin Book sales rep attending my primary school in 1974. She waxed lyrical about the latest books and left behind a catalogue. After begging 30 pence from home, I placed an order and next week the said book materialised. It had a lovely Ghostbuster cover illustration by the artist, Barry Wilkinson. Literary phantoms and apparitions were conjured from the imaginations of H.G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson et al. 
Was the boy a tad disappointed? There were no contemporary stories in the Hitch style. No Birds or Psycho. For even at this stage in life, Bodega Bay and showers, were etched in my consciousness; a generation breast fed on cinema mediated by television. 
Schooling intervened to impose a "dubious" (at the time) value of learning by rote. Reading, writing and arrrr-rithmetic! It did however provide a focus to the act of reading. Books. Discreet and unassuming objects. Turn the page. Unleash the inner voice with a tale to tell.  
Jump cut to secondary education and another memory, this time of an English class. I see a slighter older boy who copies out whole sections of text and passes it off as his own. Copyright? I didn't know the meaning of the word. My teacher rather playfully comments in the margins: Bram Gras or Edgar Allan Gras? 
Flash forward. Today is World book day in the UK and I'm chilling out with Horror: The Definitve Guide To The Cinema of Fear. A most informative survey of cinematic horror from its origins in gothic literature to postmodernism and beyond. Just the tonic for some extra-curricular research. 
Cross fade between 1974 and 2014, bookish boy and artful man. Time breeds all manner of change, but I'm still possessed by books (and films) that make the flesh creep. Although the internet has revolutionised book culture and e-books represent the future, I'm hankering for a 1,128 page book published in 2007: Mario Bava: All the Colours of the Dark by Tim Lucas. It retails at about £185. That's a lot of pennies for a humongous bank of piggies. Better still, see if the BFI or the British Library have a copy. 
End note. I cannot check out books from my local pop-up library in Kensal Rise. This was set up by the local community in resistance to the council closure of the library. In the last few weeks, building works have commenced to convert the building into housing and a skip was summoned to dispose of the books.