Scary Writers Discuss the Most Frightening Stories They have Actually Encountered

Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I discovered this tale long ago and it has lingered with me ever since. The so-called seasonal visitors turn out to be a couple from the city, who lease an identical remote lakeside house annually. On this occasion, instead of heading back home, they choose to extend their vacation a few more weeks – something that seems to unsettle all the locals in the nearby town. Each repeats a similar vague warning that nobody has remained in the area after the holiday. Nonetheless, the Allisons are determined to stay, and that’s when events begin to become stranger. The man who delivers the kerosene refuses to sell to the couple. Nobody agrees to bring groceries to their home, and as the family endeavor to go to the village, their vehicle won’t start. A storm gathers, the power of their radio fade, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals clung to each other inside their cabin and anticipated”. What are the Allisons anticipating? What might the residents be aware of? Every time I revisit the writer’s disturbing and thought-provoking story, I’m reminded that the best horror comes from what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by a noted author

In this concise narrative a couple travel to a typical seaside town where church bells toll continuously, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and unexplainable. The first truly frightening episode takes place at night, as they choose to take a walk and they are unable to locate the water. There’s sand, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and seawater, surf is audible, but the ocean is a ghost, or another thing and worse. It is simply profoundly ominous and each occasion I travel to a beach after dark I remember this tale which spoiled the sea at night to my mind – favorably.

The young couple – she’s very young, he’s not – go back to the inn and find out why the bells ring, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and mortality and youth intersects with grim ballet pandemonium. It’s a chilling reflection on desire and decay, two people growing old jointly as a couple, the connection and brutality and affection in matrimony.

Not only the scariest, but likely one of the best brief tales available, and a beloved choice. I encountered it in Spanish, in the first edition of Aickman stories to be published locally in 2011.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I read this narrative beside the swimming area overseas in 2020. Although it was sunny I felt an icy feeling within me. I also experienced the thrill of excitement. I was composing a new project, and I faced a wall. I was uncertain if it was possible any good way to compose various frightening aspects the story includes. Going through this book, I understood that it was possible.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a dark flight into the thoughts of a criminal, Quentin P, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who slaughtered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in the Midwest during a specific period. As is well-known, the killer was consumed with making a zombie sex slave that would remain with him and attempted numerous macabre trials to accomplish it.

The actions the book depicts are appalling, but equally frightening is its own mental realism. The character’s terrible, broken reality is simply narrated with concise language, names redacted. The reader is plunged stuck in his mind, forced to witness ideas and deeds that shock. The strangeness of his psyche resembles a tangible impact – or being stranded in an empty realm. 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

During my youth, I walked in my sleep and later started experiencing nightmares. Once, the horror featured a dream where I was stuck in a box and, as I roused, I discovered that I had removed a piece off the window, seeking to leave. That house was falling apart; when storms came the entranceway filled with water, insect eggs dropped from above into the bedroom, and at one time a large rat ascended the window coverings in that space.

Once a companion gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the story about the home perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable to me, nostalgic as I felt. This is a book featuring a possessed noisy, sentimental building and a girl who ingests limestone from the cliffs. I cherished the novel so much and returned again and again to it, always finding {something