A short story by SF author Fredric Brown, "Don't Look Behind You", was the alleged first-hand account of a supposed real killer who got a hold of one of the copies of the short story collection it was in. He inserted this one and only version of the story under an appropriate-looking title and is lurking around near whoever got the copy of the book with it. The author apparently didn't take into account that some people may have checked the book out of a public library a great many years after it was published.
A story with the same gimmick by Steve Gerber, titled something like "In The Shadows, In The City", appeared in the black-and-white Marvel magazine Haunt of Horror (not their short-lived prose mag of the same title).
Shel Silverstein once wrote a poem about the ugliest, scariest, meanest monster in the world. And it's standing right behind you.
He wrote another poem about an eye for which anyone who looks upon it will surely die, whose illustration is right on the page, and ends it with “It’s a good thing you didn’t. You did? Goodbye.” Parodied because, well duh! Everyone reading this is mortal! (It never said when you would die.)
By Work:
The Animorphs are always quick to remind the reader that absolutely no one is safe from the Yeerks, repeatedly noting that this includes the readers, the readers' friends, the readers' families... This fact is constantly reiterated by the teaser narration on the backs of all the books: "Everyone is in danger. Yeah. Even you."
A short story from Asimov's Science Fiction in the 1990s was told by a narrator who had encountered some cursed words in a library book that caused the reader to suffer horrible bad luck for the rest of his or her life - whoops, you just read them, too! Fortunately, words that will negate all such curses and give the reader good luck turn up in the same book near story's end.
Bruce Coville's Book of... Ghosts II: Early in Soul Survivor, the narrator — a ghost — remarks that the odd passing thoughts that people occasionally have are actually spirits passing through their bodies. It takes a turn for the serious when, at the end of the story, the ghost reveals that he has already taken up residence inside the reader's form, and is just waiting for the right time to push them out so he can wrest total control...
A very subtle case of this occurs in H. P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu, as the narrator, described in the opening as "The late Francis Waylon Thurston, of Boston" (emphasis on late), pleads with his own executors not to publish his manuscript, as everyone who has learned of its contents has died a sudden and mysterious death. Everyone, which now includes you.
Just don't take your eye off what you see, for even in your imagination, here is a creature who can do damage. Remember that it came of two fathers, both of them killers.
Greg Heffley from Diary of a Wimpy Kid once watched the movie, Hello, You're Dead!, with his friend Rowley, about a muddy hand that goes around killing people. The last person who sees the hand is always the next victim. At the end of the movie, the hand crawls straight towards the screen, implying that Greg and Rowley are the next victims. This kept them nervous and paranoid for the rest of the book.
The Universe CompendiumThe Secret Lives of Monsters ends with a note from the Doctor saying you should definitely be scared of these monsters, and moreover, you should also be scared of all the alien monsters that haven't appeared in the series. Like the one that lies in wait behind sofas...
The novelisation of "The Day of the Doctor" has interchapter comments by a mysterious figure communicating with the reader via psychic paper. This narrator tells us that Chapter Nine contains answers to every mystery of the Doctor's life, and also contains the Silence. Turning the page, he breaks off mid-sentence, and starts talking about the next chapter, but then assures the reader that they have indeed just read Chapter Nine, and if they don't remember it they can always go back and read it again. In fact, there's a blank page at the back so you can check off that you have in fact read it. Turning to the back, you find the last page is covered in five-bar gates, and scrawled in the middle of them is "HELP ME".
A nice one on the Brazilian series Dragões do Éter. The author actually uses the reader as a character, making him affect the story, making the characters aware that there are readers, but they actually think the readers are "Demi-gods". In this universe, Demi-gods are the most powerful beings in existence, and whenever The Narrator starts talking to you, awesome happens.
The Elric Saga hints that the forthcoming apocalypse will usher in the existence of the real world, i.e. the reader's world. Other Multiverse stories confirm that, yes, Stormbringer still pops up occasionally to steal people's souls.
Felicity Floo Visits the Zoo ends with the narrator saying that it was all true and it's best not to go to the zoo or you might get sick from the infected zoo animals.
Fungus The Bogey Man ends with the phrase "Fear not the Bogey Men by day, but at night, watch out."
Goosebumps: The shape-shifting supervillain, The Masked Mutant, who escaped from the world of his comic-book. It's never explained how he did this, but he claims he was bored with the heroes of his world and thinks his biggest fan, Skipper, is a more suitable opponent. In the PC game, his ambitions grow far more dangerous, planning to turn the entire real world into a comic book that he can conquer.
House of Leaves begins with repeated warnings from Johnny Truant (the fictional editor of the book) not to read the book because it will scare the pants off of you and prevent you from sleeping ever again and you will find yourself noticing that the walls of your house are maybe just a tiny bit off. As the book continues, Johnny Truant steadily goes insane after reading Zampanò's notes, even though he believes them to be largely fictional...
...Becoming unfictional when we consider the number of people who have read this book and found themselves quivering in fear as a result of the House. Just a casual peruse of the reviews on Goodreads.com is enough to attest to its true nature as Paranoia Fuel.
In fairness, even before the reader gets to Johnny Truant's warnings, they should have been warned off by the book's dedication:
This is not for you.
L. Frank Baum's Land of Oz: In The Magic of Oz, the story reveals a word that causes magical transformations when uttered. The omniscient narrator says that he would dare not reveal the word to the readers if he thought the readers would be able to use it to transform themselves or others, but since no one (other than Bini Aru or Kiki Aru) had been able to pronounce the word "Pyrzqxgl" correctly, he felt safe in revealing the word to the reader.
Similarly, Jesus may be able to "see" back down the wormcam in The Light of Other Days, although this is only vaguely hinted.
In Clive Barker's book Mister B. Gone, this trope is used horrifyingly well. The demon narrator tells the reader to close the book and burn it, at first asking, then begging, then moving into genuinely terrifying threats. Given what he does for the whole second half of the book, his descriptions of what he will do to torture you and his noting that he could be right behind you, that you could turn around and not have time to scream are not easily shrugged off. No reader, even the firmest of cynics, would want to finish the book.
In the end, he admits it was all a trick. He WANTS you to burn the book, and set him free. He can't really do anything to you after all. He asks if you will give the book to someone you don't like even.
This is the primary conceit of the literary classic The Monster at the End of This Book; Grover warns the reader not to finish the book, as they will surely be devoured by the monster. In the legendary and chilling denouement, it is revealed that Grover himself is the monster at the end of the book, and the reader is in no danger at all.
The trope is also reversed in this book, as the fourth wall does not protect Grover from the reader.
Grover: (while building brick wall to block the pages) This will stop you from turning pages. A heavy, thick, solid, strong brick wall. I would like to see you TRY to turn this page. Next page, Grover is crushed under the ruins of the brick wall. Grover: Did you know that you are very strong?
Thomas Ligotti's short story "Nethescurial". The narrator reads a short story positing that the entire world is god, and God Is Evil; the narrator snarks about the story's flaws but admits it has some interesting ideas. Scenes from the story begin to invade the narrator's dreams; finally, in his waking hours, the narrator sees the evil god at work in every physical object around him.
In the introduction to "The Most Evil Sorcerer", Stine comments that the evil sorcerer took over his body and finished the story for him.
"Afraid of Clowns" ends with Christopher, who is now a clown, threatening the reader with death via tickle torture should they reveal their secrets.
Once the main character of "Nothing Like The Sun" realizes that she is just a fictional character, she becomes furious with her authors for creating her as a joke, and making her all-powerful but be unable to remove her glowing eyes, which she finds annoying. She says that her writers were probably laughing their asses off, thinking they were safe from her wrath because they are real and she is not, but forgot that they made her omnipotent. Because she is omnipotent, she is able to bring them to her world and take her revenge. The last line of the second chapter implies that this is the case for all characters like her.
This happens several times in Pact, an urban fantasy story told in the first person. First, when the protagonist fights a demon that erases those it devours from existence, both he and the reader realize halfway through the fight that the demon has eaten three of his allies—allies that never appeared in the text of the story, leaving the reader to wonder who they were. Next, when fighting a group of chronomancers, they use their time magic to mess with his memory of the past half-hour, which is represented in the numbering of the chapters as having skipped one—going from 6.10 to 6.12, with no 6.11.
In the fourth book of The Pendragon Adventure, The Reality Bug, the Reality Bug plagues a virtual reality program that might kill everyone who is plugged into it. At the end of the book, the bug punched a hole in reality, thus escaping and ready to murder people in the real world.
Not at the end, but at one point in Ratburger, the author says that the reader may have accidentally eaten one of Burt's burgers, which are made out of rats.
An odd example occurred with Thomas Harris when writing Red Dragon. He planned out the scenes by imagining he was an invisible observer watching the whole thing play out ... except he just couldn't shake the idea that unlike with the other characters, he wasn't 100% invisible to Lecter. Even though this was a fictional character Harris himself was creating, Hannibal Lecter was still watching him.
Most writers have this particular fear...they just don't always talk about it. And it's not just writers — see also the case of David Bowie's Thin White Duke character under Music on the main page.
The author of A Series of Unfortunate Events makes very clear that your family and friends might be (and probably are) part of a gigantic conspiracy. A lot of them will probably be on the bad side of it, too. Here's how you know: Ask them what that noise was. If they say some variant of "probably nothing", they're members, because a noise is never just nothing. He also remarks on the possibility of the reader bumping into his characters, most of which are quite evil people.
The Snow Queen has the Magic Mirror, said to have been shattered into a million pieces at the dawn of time. The story relates the removal of two shards from the eye and heart of distressed dude Kai. The rest of the Mirror shards are then still making intended mind screw all over the world...
In Spiral (the sequel to Ring), it's mentioned that in addition to the Ring movie created to spread the virus, one of the characters wrote the story in book form. Just try and not drop the book in a moment of self-doubting horror.
Tales from the Year Between features in its character index (for the first volume, 'Achten Tan') an entry about a character who is not in any of the stories but has been sort of off-screen, between the lines, watching the entire time. This character is apparently in all the stories the reader has ever read, and can never be escaped.
Tambourine of the Underworld by Russian Mind Screw writer Victor Pelevin is an essay discussing the possibility of hiding a delayed action Brown Note in a short story. It ends saying that the best name for such a short story would be "Tambourine of the Underworld"note Pelevin has an unrelated mystical short story Tambourine of the Overworld, featuring both Underworld and Overworld tambourines. Thus Tambourine of the Underworld sounds like a sequel., and if you don't want to die soon, you should send money to the address below and get a cure.
The Thackery T. Lambshead Guide To Discredited Diseases has a number of entries marked with a symbol that means "Can be contracted by reading this entry". One of them, Buscard's Murrain, causes the speaker to continuously repeat a word called "the wormword". The disease is caused by pronouncing the word correctly... and of course, they've gone and printed the word in the entry (yGudluh).
In Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles, Lestat has been known to outright address the readers. Given that its an autobiography series, that is not surprising. But considering he's a blood-drinking immortal who can hear the minds and hearts of all mortals around the world, that can be a bit unnerving or inviting when he says he'd love to visit you in your bedroom for a snack....and he reads his reviews too.
Narrator: Out of all the schools, Todd had been sent to the very worst one, it was awful! The very first thing he had to do every morning was—- Wait a second, I don't have to tell you, you already know. Todd was sent to your school.
The modern-day storyline of the book Angel of Ruin is about a skeptical reporter looking for a story. She becomes involved with a magic group and through them comes in contact with an old woman known as the Wanderer. Based on the legend of the Wandering Jew, the woman has been cursed to wander the Earth till she can find someone to listen to her story. She warns the reporter that if she listens to the tale she will be cursed. Most of the book is the actual story... a tale of three sisters who encounter a fallen angel. At the end of the story it's revealed that the reporter published the story in order to pass the curse to others. The very book you have just been reading.
For all you know, a witch might be living next door to you right now. Or she might be the woman with the bright eyes who sat opposite you on the bus this morning. She might be the lady with the dazzling smile who offered you a sweet from a white paper bag in the street before lunch. She might even — and this will make you jump — she might even be your lovely school-teacher who is reading these words to you at this very moment. Look at that teacher. Perhaps she is smiling at the absurdity of such a suggestion. Don't let that put you off. It could be part of her cleverness. I am not, of course, telling you for one second that your teacher actually is a witch. All I am saying is that she might be one. It is most unlikely. But — and here comes the big "but" — it is not impossible.
Bastian looks out at the fourth wall outright of the book he was reading during one chapter...
And the Childlike Empress outright demands for the Old Man Of Wandering Mountain to read the book that YOU are reading, creating an endless loop based round that one event!
In the Thursday Next universe, the titular detective, Thursday, can enter the fiction of books. One day, during a private bit of time with her husband in the supposed real world, her book jumping senses fire and she detects all the readers. Including you.
is enough to attest to its true nature as Paranoia Fuel.