Scary Novelists Share the Scariest Tales They have Ever Encountered

Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I read this story some time back and it has haunted me ever since. The so-called seasonal visitors happen to be the Allisons urban dwellers, who occupy a particular remote rural cabin each year. During this visit, in place of heading back home, they decide to prolong their vacation a few more weeks – an action that appears to alarm all the locals in the adjacent village. Each repeats the same veiled caution that not a soul has remained by the water after the end of summer. Even so, they are determined to stay, and that is the moment events begin to grow more bizarre. The individual who brings oil refuses to sell to them. Not a single person agrees to bring groceries to their home, and when they attempt to drive into town, the automobile fails to start. A storm gathers, the batteries within the device diminish, and when night comes, “the aged individuals crowded closely inside their cabin and expected”. What could be they anticipating? What do the townspeople understand? Every time I revisit Jackson’s chilling and thought-provoking narrative, I remember that the finest fright originates in the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this short story a pair go to a common beach community where church bells toll the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and unexplainable. The first extremely terrifying scene takes place at night, when they choose to walk around and they fail to see the water. Sand is present, there is the odor of rotting fish and brine, waves crash, but the ocean seems phantom, or another thing and worse. It’s just deeply malevolent and every time I visit to a beach after dark I remember this narrative that ruined the ocean after dark to my mind – favorably.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, he’s not – return to the inn and learn the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and death-and-the-maiden encounters danse macabre chaos. It’s an unnerving reflection on desire and deterioration, two bodies aging together as partners, the connection and brutality and tenderness within wedlock.

Not merely the most terrifying, but perhaps one of the best brief tales available, and an individual preference. I encountered it en español, in the debut release of these tales to be published locally in 2011.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I perused this narrative near the water in the French countryside a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I experienced a chill over me. I also felt the electricity of fascination. I was composing a new project, and I faced an obstacle. I was uncertain if there was a proper method to compose certain terrifying elements the story includes. Reading Zombie, I realized that it could be done.

Released decades ago, the novel is a bleak exploration through the mind of a criminal, the main character, based on a notorious figure, the serial killer who slaughtered and mutilated multiple victims in Milwaukee over a decade. Notoriously, the killer was obsessed with making a submissive individual that would remain him and attempted numerous horrific efforts to do so.

The deeds the story tells are terrible, but equally frightening is its own mental realism. The character’s terrible, shattered existence is directly described in spare prose, details omitted. You is plunged caught in his thoughts, forced to observe mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The foreignness of his mind is like a bodily jolt – or getting lost in an empty realm. Going into Zombie is less like reading but a complete immersion. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced suffering from bad dreams. Once, the fear included a nightmare where I was trapped inside a container and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had torn off a part out of the window frame, attempting to escape. That building was decaying; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall filled with water, insect eggs dropped from above onto the bed, and once a large rat scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

Once a companion presented me with the story, I was residing elsewhere at my family home, but the story regarding the building located on the coastline felt familiar to myself, homesick as I was. It is a story about a haunted clamorous, atmospheric home and a female character who eats limestone off the rocks. I loved the story deeply and came back repeatedly to the story, consistently uncovering {something