Nightmare Fuel / I Shall Wear Midnight

• The Cunning Man, especially when he tries to leap out of a copy of his old book.
  • It's also his terrifying use of mob psychology: he makes people turn against witches and anyone who is "other". He makes people think the old thoughts, the stupid thoughts, the thoughts of a hag kidnapping children, casting curses, and being in league with monsters. Tiffany is not only the granddaughter of the Chalk's revered Granny Aching, but has saved many of their lives and worked ceaselessly to help every person on the Chalk. Yet the whole Chalk turns against Tiffany without any proof, based only on twisted rumor that has a bare seed of truth behind it. Worse, the Cunning Man's poison fuels Roland sending his soldiers to destroy the Nac Mac Feegle's mound, children, and kelda, which would have ended with the Feegles slaughtering every person on the Chalk in vengeance. It's an unsettling and disturbingly-accurate mirror of too many Real Life examples to count, and that makes I Shall Wear Midnight the scariest book of the four.
  • Perhaps even worse is the language used to describe him. Pterry's writing can be uplifting, heartwarming, and beautiful, but when he wanted to he could leave you feeling like you needed a long bath for your soul. The Cunning Man is one of the most acute examples of this. He doesn't make your skin crawl, he makes it turn and run.
    A man with no eyes, no eyes at all. Only two tunnels in his head...
  • And what's even worse is that the witches themselves aren't immune to the Hate Plague. He doesn't just make normal people turn against witches, he can make the witches turn against each other.
• Amber Petty's miscarriage. She's thirteen.
• The rough music: For the sake of peace and quiet, the people of the chalk will put up with a certain amount of Mr Petty's domestic abuse, but after causing his daughter's miscarriage, only a lot of quick thinking by Tiffany stops the mob from lynching him.
• The book manages to turn the Morality Pet trope into one of these. Every inmate in the Tanty is given a songbird as a pet, and men who have committed unspeakable crimes often care for their birds gently and lovingly. Truly heartwarming... until the warden of the Tanty points out a piece of Fridge Horror: if seemingly evil people are capable of kindness under the right circumstances, what are seemingly kind people capable of under the wrong ones?

• Tiffany tells her father the story of the old lady in the woods. Before this book began, Tiffany checked on an old lady who had not been seen or heard of for two months. In fact she had died. Somebody had to tidy up and reverentially bury the corpse. She was, in life, a Crazy Cat Lady. Shut in with her body, hungry cats have resorted to the only available source of calories. And one of the cats had kittens. In bed with the corpse. Horror piles on horror. And at the end, Tiffany casually says that homing the kittens, which had such beautiful blue eyes, meant she had to go a long way away to find people who did not know the backstory. Now reflect that in the previous book, she gifted a kitten called You to Granny Weatherwax. And You the kitten has such beautiful blue eyes...