Scary Novelists Share the Most Terrifying Tales They have Ever Read

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by a master of suspense

I discovered this story some time back and it has stayed with me ever since. The titular “summer people” turn out to be the Allisons from New York, who occupy a particular off-grid country cottage every summer. This time, rather than going back to the city, they opt to prolong their vacation for a month longer – an action that appears to unsettle each resident in the adjacent village. All pass on the same veiled caution that not a soul has lingered in the area beyond the end of summer. Nonetheless, the Allisons are determined to not leave, and at that point things start to grow more bizarre. The individual who supplies fuel declines to provide to them. Nobody will deliver groceries to the cottage, and when the family attempt to travel to the community, the automobile fails to start. Bad weather approaches, the energy in the radio die, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple clung to each other in their summer cottage and expected”. What are they waiting for? What could the residents understand? Every time I read this author’s unnerving and thought-provoking tale, I’m reminded that the best horror originates in that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this short story a couple journey to a typical beach community where bells ring continuously, a perpetual pealing that is annoying and unexplainable. The opening extremely terrifying moment occurs during the evening, as they choose to walk around and they fail to see the sea. The beach is there, the scent exists of decaying seafood and seawater, surf is audible, but the ocean seems phantom, or something else and even more alarming. It is truly insanely sinister and each occasion I visit to the coast in the evening I remember this narrative which spoiled the sea at night in my view – positively.

The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – head back to the inn and discover the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden intersects with grim ballet bedlam. It’s a chilling contemplation on desire and decay, two bodies aging together as spouses, the bond and violence and gentleness in matrimony.

Not just the scariest, but probably a top example of concise narratives out there, and a personal favourite. I encountered it en español, in the initial publication of these tales to appear in Argentina in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from an esteemed writer

I perused Zombie by a pool in the French countryside a few years ago. Although it was sunny I felt cold creep within me. I also felt the electricity of anticipation. I was working on a new project, and I encountered a block. I didn’t know whether there existed an effective approach to write some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Experiencing this novel, I understood that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a dark flight within the psyche of a criminal, the protagonist, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who killed and mutilated numerous individuals in the Midwest over a decade. Infamously, this person was consumed with creating a submissive individual that would remain by his side and made many grisly attempts to accomplish it.

The actions the novel describes are terrible, but similarly terrifying is its own psychological persuasiveness. The character’s dreadful, fragmented world is directly described with concise language, details omitted. You is immersed stuck in his mind, compelled to observe ideas and deeds that appal. The strangeness of his mind is like a bodily jolt – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Going into Zombie feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and subsequently commenced experiencing nightmares. At one point, the terror featured a vision where I was confined in a box and, upon awakening, I realized that I had torn off a part out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That house was crumbling; during heavy rain the entranceway became inundated, fly larvae came down from the roof into the bedroom, and once a large rat climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.

After an acquaintance presented me with this author’s book, I was residing elsewhere in my childhood residence, but the story regarding the building located on the coastline seemed recognizable in my view, homesick as I was. This is a book about a haunted loud, atmospheric home and a female character who eats calcium off the rocks. I cherished the novel so much and came back repeatedly to it, each time discovering {something