20 #SpookierBooks Tweets That'll Haunt You

The Halloween spirit has captured Twitter. Viking Books started the Friday fun with the #SpookierBooks hashtag, and the premise is simple: Adjust a book title to make it seem a lot creepier than it actually is.

Some people chose to go the classics route, while others were more focused on contemporary lit, but hundreds of tweeters, writers, and publishers were up to the challenge. And they scored major bonus points by picking completely benign book titles and making us twist the way we see them. We'll never be able to think of some of them in the same way again. (I'm looking at you, person who just ruined the childhood classic Where's Waldo?)

If you also included an image, book cover, or GIF, you get extra applause. As always, when it comes to this hashtag business, there were peaks and valleys, some people who didn't quite get it, and others who shined. But some people have that magical punny bone in their bodies and pulled out some real gems, whether they were scary or just laugh-out-loud funny. These 20 tweets were the best of the best in the #SpookierBooks hashtag game, so it's now up to you to defeat them.

Well this one just makes me sad, frankly. Poor Waldo.

Meanwhile, Claire proves that a little spacing can change the entire meaning of a book into something far more sinister.

Oh gosh, where is the knife?

Cannibalism: Always scary. Bonus points for choosing such a non-scary title to work with.

Ahh! This urban legend will never fail to scare me, so major points, even though it may not be as concise as others.

See, what this one does is also add in extra scariness on the "love" and "eat" parts. Are they in love with the person they just killed? Did they eat them? I'll stop there.

Slime is scary unless it's green and comes from Nickelodeon, because then it's just part of my childhood dreams of being on You Can't Do That On Television.

Well, this will be in my nightmares tonight.

If you want to get right into it, weren't they kind of "grave" expectations all along for Pip?

I'm slightly ashamed to admit that I gave a big LOL to this one, which went above and beyond with the accompanying GIF.

This one, too. Big laughs.

Ah, the cousin to Pandora's Box.

While good, I have to call out Penguin here, because R.L. Stine already saw the pun here and published a book with the exact title. So Stine is really playing this Twitter hashtag game by himself in his own writing world, much to all of our joy.

Top notch.

Scary and timely.

Someone in the world has to have a haunted lighthouse called a Frighthouse, right? Please say it's true.

Garp knows all. And you don't want to hear what he has to say.

At least you know it's coming?

And I'm taken back to the actual horror of reading the original in my 11th grade English class from that gigantic tissue-paper pages anthology.

And now, for the absolute best submission to the hashtag:

Perfect. And he didn't even have to change the actual title. It's like the horror was living right in front of us in an American classic and we didn't even know it.