Frightening Writers Reveal the Scariest Stories They have Actually Read

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I discovered this tale long ago and it has haunted me since then. The titular “summer people” happen to be the Allisons urban dwellers, who lease a particular remote country cottage annually. During this visit, instead of going back to the city, they opt to extend their vacation a few more weeks – something that seems to unsettle each resident in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that not a soul has remained at the lake after Labor Day. Regardless, they are determined to remain, and at that point situations commence to get increasingly weird. The man who delivers the kerosene declines to provide to them. No one will deliver groceries to the cottage, and at the time the Allisons attempt to travel to the community, the car won’t start. A tempest builds, the batteries within the device die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people huddled together in their summer cottage and waited”. What are they waiting for? What could the townspeople be aware of? Whenever I read this author’s unnerving and influential narrative, I recall that the finest fright comes from that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a couple journey to a typical seaside town where church bells toll the whole time, an incessant ringing that is irritating and unexplainable. The opening very scary episode takes place during the evening, as they decide to walk around and they are unable to locate the sea. Sand is present, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and salt, there are waves, but the ocean appears spectral, or a different entity and worse. It’s just profoundly ominous and every time I go to a beach at night I recall this tale that ruined the sea at night to my mind – favorably.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, the husband is older – return to their lodging and learn the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of confinement, gruesome festivities and death-and-the-maiden intersects with dance of death chaos. It is a disturbing reflection on desire and decline, two people growing old jointly as partners, the bond and violence and gentleness within wedlock.

Not merely the scariest, but perhaps a top example of brief tales available, and a beloved choice. I encountered it in Spanish, in the initial publication of this author’s works to be published in this country several years back.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I read this book beside the swimming area in the French countryside a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I sensed cold creep within me. Additionally, I sensed the thrill of excitement. I was writing my latest book, and I faced a wall. I didn’t know if there was any good way to craft some of the fearful things the book contains. Reading Zombie, I realized that it was possible.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a grim journey through the mind of a young serial killer, Quentin P, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who killed and dismembered numerous individuals in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, Dahmer was obsessed with creating a zombie sex slave who would never leave with him and attempted numerous macabre trials to accomplish it.

The acts the novel describes are horrific, but just as scary is its emotional authenticity. The character’s terrible, shattered existence is simply narrated in spare prose, details omitted. You is plunged trapped in his consciousness, forced to observe thoughts and actions that horrify. The alien nature of his thinking resembles a tangible impact – or being stranded in an empty realm. Starting Zombie is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and subsequently commenced having night terrors. At one point, the horror included a dream in which I was confined inside a container and, as I roused, I realized that I had removed the slat out of the window frame, trying to get out. That house was decaying; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall filled with water, maggots dropped from above onto the bed, and at one time a large rat scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

Once a companion handed me the story, I was no longer living with my parents, but the story regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable in my view, homesick as I felt. It’s a story about a haunted clamorous, emotional house and a female character who ingests calcium from the cliffs. I adored the book immensely and went back again and again to it, always finding {something