A Horror from dim Yesteryear

What do we want when we pick out a horror novel to read, when we purchase them and take them home and dive right in?
There's of course the desire, the expectation of being scared, with our own fear sought out and recognized in the moment. Fear, but at a safe remove from daily life, in a comfort zone of our choosing with eyes riveted to the page, hands gripped around the covers eager to see what's next.

Horror is a demanding genre. Demanding in what it requires from the reader.

Alot of times I get lost in what I think what fear in a horror novel ought to mean; shouting in surprise, shock or disgust, and your mind stepping back from behind your eyes, detaching itself for a moment in shock and bewilderment.
But that isn't fear, or at least not totally. Fear is dread. The anticipation of something that might happen. Might. Because it might not.

These days, it's mostly an idle hope to try and capture that feeling. The remove, that distance, has slotted into place and the mind has become less malleable.

I've been scared maybe a handful of times by written fiction.

Mostly that honour lies reserved for Adam Nevill's The Ritual, which for its sublime first half also relied on the build-up of fear coupled with moments of horror in its nightmare sequences and contrasted with its suddenly bizarrely shit second half, though I admit that the last pages managed to become quite good again.

I read it over the course of a single overcast afternoon, with the drawn blinds adding a grey gloom to the room.
I was so deep into it that I almost literally could hear the greedy excited tapping of hooves on the boards inside of a coffin. It's the sound, the perfect way it presented itself to my mind later that night, that made me creep fearfully underneath the covers. Good times.

There was another book that literally gave me nightmares when I was a kid, and I've tried to find it several times to see how it would hold up. I suspect that it would be disappointing now, it was, after all, read in a different time, in a time when there was no remove between story and immersion. When one grows up, the remove slots almost inextricably in the way. There's too much distance to be fully immersed.

The first time I read it I couldn't finish it, and I remember my parents taking it away from me because it was interfering with the household's sleeping cycle. I woke people up, in tears, because it frightened me so much.
Some time after, no idea how much, but years at least, I came back to it, borrowed it from the library  and found it, if not scary, then at least still very disturbing.

It was a tale of aliens, and of kidnapped teenagers forced to engage in bloody death-defying circus acts for their amusement. Of old people in horrific costumes and of rabid children tearing a tormentor apart, eating him, on a bridge overlooking trees while a talking rabbit doll screams for blood and violence in the voice of a small girl. The book ended with the survivors clad in blood and gore and wondering where to go next.

I really wish I could remember what it was called.
For some reason I keep thinking it's called Galaxy Wars, but try to google that in this day and age.
It's the age of Star Wars and easy escapism, baby, nothing else can compete.

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Edit: The Ink-Stained Beard got it pretty much within minutes of posting...
What the hell, man? How???
Anyway: the book is Galax-Arena by Gillian Rubinstein: