Nightmare Fuel / Abarat

• From the first book, we have...
  • The John brothers. One man... and six tiny heads growing out of the horns on his head. The book is illustrated, so even if you don't want to picture it, you see it. Hello, Body Horror! Though the horror does decrease quite a bit when you discover they are both pretty goofy and sincerely good guys.
  • On that note, Shape — The Dragon. A one-legged man who walks just fine on the stump of his missing foot... and has swords embedded in the flesh of his back, which he can pull out and put back in as well! And unlike the John brothers who are nice and helpful, Shape is a sadistic murderer who will sing an Ironic Nursery Rhyme just to terrify those he is chasing.
  • The Stitchlings, zombie-like minions filled with mud, and occasionally random internal organs, stitched together from random bits of old rotting flesh, by an insane old woman who never sleeps, and who once sewed her grandson's lips together for daring to say the word "love".
  • One Stitchling is described as having a fully functioning colon, but no anus. Poor thing's been stuck with a permanent case of constipation.
  • The brothers on the Time Out of Time, who have no faces; just random facial features on crablike legs, that crawl around their otherwise blank faces.
  • And of course, there's the Big Bad himself, whose face is surrounded by a vat of liquid in which electrical, pulsing nightmares swim. They come from tubes embedded in his skull.
• Then you get to the second book, and you add to this...
  • Leeman Vol, one of the Big Bad's henchmen that lost his nose to a spider and wears a crude leather nose in place, and is able to speak to insects because of his three pointy-teethed mouths. Not helping is that Vol has an insect-infected head. He has so many lice and ants and things living on him that when Shape hits him, some bugs actually fall off.
  • The Sacbrood, a voracious, highly adaptable and eternally reproducing kind of insect that inhabits the pyramids of Xuxux. The picture may not be very definite, but then again, depending on the strenght your imagination, the scene where they kill Mendelson Shape may be scarier. Carrion and Motley are cultivating them specifically so that their numbers will grow great enough to literally blot out the Abarat's sky end to end.
  • Carrion's nightmares are pictured even more terrifying, including a scene right in the first chapter when they suck the fear out of a rather innocent man.
  • Then there's the picture of Christopher right before he dies. A freakin' skull, screaming out of a dark abyss!
• And then the third book intentionally tones the danger down on average so it can ramp the horror.
  • Mater Motley fully displays just how psychopathic she actually is, from intentionally making a friend for the explicit purpose of betraying and murdering said friend for ritual components, to bragging about how she orchestrated the deaths of her entire family, with a literal special place for her grandchildren as she harvested her souls to enchant her flesh, and outright allying with eldritch abominations to cause terror and destruction across her home planet.
  • The Nephauree, Those Who Walk Behind The Stars, are Mater Motley's benefactors and the series' greatest apparent evil. They are an entire alien race with magic and technology like nothing seen on the Abarat. They are essentially amorphous blots of smoky darkness concealing a true form so evil and grotesque that those few who can see it and survive remember nothing about it, and they are so terribly powerful that Mater Motley trusted just one to personally kill every one of the thousands of people present at the third book's final battle. Yet even Mater Motley, the most maniacal and shamelessly wicked character we have seen thus far, is absolutely terrified of the Nephauree and just glancing at one was enough to unnerve her greatly. Their true motives are as yet unknown, but they are apparently looking forward to a "harvest" of the Abarat that will bring all life there to an end.

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