Frightening Writers Reveal the Most Frightening Narratives They have Actually Encountered

Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I read this tale years ago and it has stayed with me ever since. The named vacationers happen to be a family urban dwellers, who lease a particular remote rural cabin each year. On this occasion, in place of returning to the city, they opt to extend their stay a few more weeks – a decision that to alarm everyone in the surrounding community. All pass on the same veiled caution that nobody has lingered at the lake after the end of summer. Even so, the couple insist to stay, and that is the moment situations commence to grow more bizarre. The man who supplies oil refuses to sell for them. Not a single person is willing to supply supplies to the cottage, and at the time the Allisons try to go to the village, the car won’t start. A tempest builds, the energy in the radio fade, and when night comes, “the elderly couple crowded closely inside their cabin and expected”. What could be the Allisons expecting? What could the residents be aware of? Each occasion I peruse Jackson’s unnerving and thought-provoking narrative, I remember that the top terror comes from that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes from a noted author

In this concise narrative a pair journey to an ordinary beach community where bells ring continuously, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and puzzling. The opening very scary moment happens after dark, at the time they decide to go for a stroll and they fail to see the water. Sand is present, the scent exists of putrid marine life and salt, there are waves, but the sea seems phantom, or another thing and even more alarming. It is truly insanely sinister and every time I go to the shore at night I think about this narrative that ruined the beach in the evening to my mind – positively.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – return to their lodging and learn the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and death-and-the-maiden encounters grim ballet chaos. It’s an unnerving meditation on desire and decay, two people growing old jointly as partners, the bond and aggression and affection in matrimony.

Not only the scariest, but perhaps one of the best concise narratives out there, and a beloved choice. I read it en español, in the debut release of these tales to be published in Argentina in 2011.

Catriona Ward

Zombie from an esteemed writer

I read this book near the water in the French countryside in 2020. Even with the bright weather I felt cold creep within me. I also felt the thrill of anticipation. I was composing my third novel, and I had hit a wall. I was uncertain if it was possible any good way to compose various frightening aspects the book contains. Reading Zombie, I understood that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a bleak exploration into the thoughts of a young serial killer, the main character, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who slaughtered and mutilated numerous individuals in a city during a specific period. Notoriously, this person was fixated with creating a zombie sex slave that would remain him and attempted numerous grisly attempts to achieve this.

The acts the story tells are horrific, but similarly terrifying is the mental realism. The protagonist’s terrible, fragmented world is plainly told with concise language, names redacted. You is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, compelled to observe thoughts and actions that appal. The alien nature of his thinking resembles a tangible impact – or getting lost in an empty realm. Starting this story feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I sleepwalked and later started suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the terror featured a vision during which I was stuck in a box and, as I roused, I found that I had torn off the slat off the window, trying to get out. That home was decaying; when storms came the entranceway filled with water, maggots dropped from above onto the bed, and once a big rodent ascended the window coverings in the bedroom.

When a friend presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out with my parents, but the narrative about the home located on the coastline felt familiar in my view, longing as I was. It’s a novel concerning a ghostly loud, atmospheric home and a girl who ingests chalk from the cliffs. I cherished the book deeply and returned again and again to its pages, each time discovering {something