Scary Novelists Share the Most Frightening Narratives They have Ever Encountered

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson

I discovered this narrative years ago and it has haunted me since then. The named “summer people” turn out to be the Allisons from the city, who lease an identical remote rural cabin annually. This time, rather than heading back to the city, they opt to extend their stay for a month longer – a decision that to unsettle everyone in the adjacent village. All pass on an identical cryptic advice that no one has ever stayed in the area past the end of summer. Even so, they are determined to remain, and at that point situations commence to become stranger. The person who delivers fuel refuses to sell to the couple. Nobody will deliver groceries to the cottage, and as the family try to drive into town, their vehicle refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the power of their radio diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the aged individuals clung to each other in their summer cottage and expected”. What could be this couple expecting? What could the townspeople know? Every time I peruse Jackson’s unnerving and influential narrative, I remember that the best horror comes from that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a couple travel to a common beach community where bells ring constantly, a perpetual pealing that is irritating and puzzling. The initial extremely terrifying moment occurs after dark, at the time they decide to take a walk and they fail to see the sea. The beach is there, there’s the smell of rotting fish and salt, there are waves, but the sea seems phantom, or something else and even more alarming. It’s just insanely sinister and each occasion I go to a beach in the evening I recall this narrative that ruined the ocean after dark for me – in a good way.

The newlyweds – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – go back to their lodging and find out the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of confinement, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden encounters grim ballet pandemonium. It’s an unnerving meditation regarding craving and decay, two people growing old jointly as spouses, the attachment and aggression and gentleness within wedlock.

Not merely the most terrifying, but perhaps among the finest concise narratives in existence, and an individual preference. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of these tales to be released locally several years back.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I read Zombie near the water in the French countryside recently. Although it was sunny I sensed cold creep within me. I also felt the thrill of anticipation. I was writing my latest book, and I had hit an obstacle. I didn’t know if there was an effective approach to write various frightening aspects the story includes. Going through this book, I saw that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a dark flight into the thoughts of a young serial killer, Quentin P, modeled after an infamous individual, the criminal who murdered and mutilated numerous individuals in the Midwest over a decade. Infamously, this person was fixated with producing a submissive individual who would stay by his side and made many macabre trials to do so.

The deeds the book depicts are appalling, but just as scary is its psychological persuasiveness. The protagonist’s dreadful, broken reality is directly described with concise language, names redacted. The reader is sunk deep stuck in his mind, obliged to observe mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The strangeness of his psyche resembles a bodily jolt – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Entering Zombie is less like reading but a complete immersion. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I was a somnambulist and eventually began having night terrors. At one point, the fear featured a dream in which I was stuck within an enclosure and, upon awakening, I found that I had torn off a piece from the window, attempting to escape. That house was crumbling; during heavy rain the entranceway filled with water, insect eggs dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and at one time a large rat scaled the curtains in that space.

When a friend presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere at my family home, but the tale of the house high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to myself, longing as I was. It is a book concerning a ghostly loud, atmospheric home and a female character who consumes chalk from the cliffs. I adored the book immensely and returned repeatedly to its pages, always finding {something