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I started watching the horror anthology series Creepshow on Viaplay, and the second episode was already unsettling to me because of its subject matter. In that episode, a girl had a dollhouse, and in her absence, its inhabitants began to move to different places on their own.
Then I started thinking about my memorable unsettling reading experiences.
They all seem to have something in common, namely something evil that keeps getting closer.
Stephen King's The Sun Dog (from the collection Four Past Midnight)
A boy receives a Polaroid camera as a gift. In every picture he takes, a dog appears. At first, just as a small dot in the background, but it gets closer and more threatening as it goes. What happens when the menacing dog crosses the line between photographs and reality?
The Moving Finger by Stephen King (from the collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes)
A man notices a finger in the opening of the bathroom sink. An epic battle ensues between him and the surprisingly long finger.
I had no idea that this story was reportedly made into an episode of the TV series Monsters.
I think it was while I was reading this collection of short stories that a scary thing happened to me. When I returned to my room after being away, I thought the book was in a different place than where I had left it. It scared me.
The Road Virus Heads North by Stephen King (from the collection Everything's Eventual)
A man buys a painting from a yard sale. The artist of the painting was said to have been mentally disturbed and killed himself. As the man travels home, the painting changes to reflect the place he has just been. And people start dying in those places. When the man gets home, the road virus also arrives...
There are of course many other disturbing reading experiences, but these were the first ones that came to mind without thinking.