Scary Authors Share the Most Frightening Narratives They've Actually Read
Andrew Michael Hurley
A Chilling Tale by a master of suspense
I read this story long ago and it has stayed with me from that moment. The named seasonal visitors turn out to be a couple from New York, who rent the same remote country cottage annually. On this occasion, instead of returning home, they choose to lengthen their holiday a few more weeks – an action that appears to unsettle all the locals in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys the same veiled caution that not a soul has remained in the area after the end of summer. Even so, the Allisons are determined to stay, and that’s when things start to grow more bizarre. The individual who brings oil won’t sell to the couple. No one agrees to bring supplies to the cabin, and as they attempt to drive into town, the automobile refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the energy within the device diminish, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals huddled together in their summer cottage and waited”. What could be they expecting? What might the residents know? Every time I revisit Jackson’s chilling and influential story, I remember that the finest fright originates in what’s left undisclosed.
Mariana Enríquez
An Eerie Story from a noted author
In this brief tale two people journey to a typical beach community in which chimes sound the whole time, a constant chiming that is irritating and inexplicable. The initial truly frightening scene occurs at night, when they decide to walk around and they can’t find the water. The beach is there, there is the odor of putrid marine life and salt, waves crash, but the ocean is a ghost, or another thing and more dreadful. It is truly profoundly ominous and every time I travel to a beach in the evening I remember this story that destroyed the sea at night for me – favorably.
The recent spouses – she’s very young, he’s not – return to their lodging and find out the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and demise and innocence intersects with grim ballet bedlam. It is a disturbing reflection about longing and deterioration, two people growing old jointly as partners, the connection and aggression and tenderness of marriage.
Not only the scariest, but likely one of the best short stories in existence, and a personal favourite. I experienced it en español, in the debut release of these tales to appear in Argentina a decade ago.
A Prominent Novelist
A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer
I read Zombie beside the swimming area in the French countryside a few years ago. Despite the sunshine I experienced an icy feeling over me. I also felt the thrill of excitement. I was writing my third novel, and I encountered a block. I didn’t know whether there existed an effective approach to compose some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I saw that there was a way.
Published in 1995, the novel is a grim journey through the mind of a criminal, the main character, modeled after a notorious figure, the criminal who murdered and cut apart 17 young men and boys in a city between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, the killer was obsessed with producing a compliant victim who would never leave with him and carried out several horrific efforts to achieve this.
The deeds the book depicts are appalling, but just as scary is its psychological persuasiveness. The character’s terrible, shattered existence is simply narrated with concise language, details omitted. The audience is immersed trapped in his consciousness, compelled to see thoughts and actions that appal. The alien nature of his thinking feels like a bodily jolt – or getting lost on a desolate planet. Entering Zombie feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are consumed entirely.
Daisy Johnson
White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi
When I was a child, I sleepwalked and eventually began experiencing nightmares. Once, the terror included a vision during which I was trapped inside a container and, upon awakening, I realized that I had torn off a part from the window, trying to get out. That home was falling apart; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall filled with water, maggots came down from the roof onto the bed, and once a large rat climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.
After an acquaintance presented me with the story, I had moved out at my family home, but the story about the home perched on the cliffs appeared known to myself, homesick at that time. It is a story featuring a possessed clamorous, emotional house and a girl who ingests calcium from the shoreline. I loved the novel immensely and returned frequently to it, each time discovering {something
