Scary Novelists Share the Most Frightening Narratives They've Actually Read
Andrew Michael Hurley
The Summer People from a master of suspense
I discovered this tale years ago and it has haunted me ever since. The so-called “summer people” turn out to be a couple urban dwellers, who rent a particular remote rural cabin every summer. On this occasion, instead of heading back to urban life, they choose to lengthen their holiday an extra month – a decision that to unsettle everyone in the nearby town. All pass on an identical cryptic advice that not a soul has lingered by the water after Labor Day. Regardless, they are resolved to not leave, and that’s when situations commence to get increasingly weird. The man who brings the kerosene refuses to sell for them. No one is willing to supply food to the cottage, and as the Allisons try to drive into town, their vehicle refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the power of their radio fade, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple huddled together inside their cabin and anticipated”. What are the Allisons expecting? What might the locals be aware of? Whenever I peruse Jackson’s chilling and influential tale, I remember that the best horror originates in that which remains hidden.
Mariana Enríquez
An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman
In this brief tale a couple travel to an ordinary coastal village in which chimes sound the whole time, an incessant ringing that is irritating and unexplainable. The opening very scary scene occurs at night, when they opt to walk around and they are unable to locate the sea. There’s sand, the scent exists of decaying seafood and salt, there are waves, but the ocean is a ghost, or something else and worse. It is truly profoundly ominous and whenever I visit to the shore after dark I remember this story that ruined the beach in the evening for me – positively.
The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – return to the hotel and learn the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and mortality and youth intersects with grim ballet bedlam. It’s an unnerving meditation regarding craving and deterioration, a pair of individuals aging together as partners, the bond and aggression and gentleness within wedlock.
Not merely the most terrifying, but perhaps among the finest short stories in existence, and a personal favourite. I read it in Spanish, in the initial publication of these tales to appear locally in 2011.
Catriona Ward
Zombie by an esteemed writer
I perused this book by a pool in the French countryside a few years ago. Despite the sunshine I sensed a chill through me. Additionally, I sensed the excitement of fascination. I was working on my latest book, and I encountered a block. I didn’t know if it was possible any good way to compose various frightening aspects the book contains. Reading Zombie, I saw that it could be done.
Released decades ago, the story is a dark flight within the psyche of a criminal, the main character, modeled after an infamous individual, the serial killer who murdered and mutilated multiple victims in a city between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, Dahmer was fixated with producing a compliant victim who would never leave with him and made many grisly attempts to do so.
The acts the book depicts are horrific, but equally frightening is the emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s awful, fragmented world is plainly told using minimal words, names redacted. The reader is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, compelled to observe thoughts and actions that horrify. The strangeness of his psyche resembles a bodily jolt – or getting lost in an empty realm. Entering Zombie is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are consumed entirely.
Daisy Johnson
White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi
During my youth, I was a somnambulist and later started experiencing nightmares. On one occasion, the terror involved a vision in which I was trapped within an enclosure and, upon awakening, I realized that I had ripped a piece off the window, trying to get out. That home was falling apart; when it rained heavily the ground floor corridor filled with water, fly larvae came down from the roof into the bedroom, and once a large rat climbed the drapes in that space.
Once a companion gave me this author’s book, I had moved out with my parents, but the tale of the house high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to me, longing at that time. This is a novel concerning a ghostly loud, sentimental building and a young woman who eats calcium off the rocks. I cherished the novel deeply and returned frequently to its pages, each time discovering {something
