Scary Novelists Reveal the Most Terrifying Tales They've Actually Encountered

Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by a master of suspense

I read this story some time back and it has lingered with me since then. The named “summer people” happen to be a couple from New York, who rent a particular off-grid lakeside house every summer. During this visit, instead of returning home, they opt to lengthen their holiday an extra month – a decision that to alarm everyone in the adjacent village. All pass on a similar vague warning that no one has lingered at the lake beyond the holiday. Even so, the couple insist to remain, and at that point events begin to get increasingly weird. The man who supplies the kerosene declines to provide to the couple. Not a single person will deliver food to the cabin, and at the time the family attempt to go to the village, the automobile won’t start. A tempest builds, the batteries in the radio die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people crowded closely in their summer cottage and expected”. What are this couple expecting? What could the townspeople understand? Every time I read Jackson’s chilling and inspiring story, I remember that the finest fright originates in what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative two people travel to a typical seaside town where church bells toll continuously, a perpetual pealing that is annoying and puzzling. The initial extremely terrifying scene occurs after dark, when they choose to walk around and they are unable to locate the ocean. The beach is there, there is the odor of putrid marine life and brine, surf is audible, but the water appears spectral, or a different entity and more dreadful. It is truly insanely sinister and every time I travel to the coast after dark I remember this tale which spoiled the sea at night in my view – positively.

The recent spouses – she’s very young, he’s not – go back to the inn and find out the reason for the chiming, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and mortality and youth intersects with grim ballet bedlam. It is a disturbing contemplation regarding craving and decline, two people maturing in tandem as a couple, the bond and aggression and gentleness in matrimony.

Not merely the most terrifying, but probably among the finest short stories out there, and a beloved choice. I read it in Spanish, in the first edition of these tales to be published in Argentina several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates

I perused Zombie by a pool overseas a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I experienced a chill through me. I also experienced the excitement of anticipation. I was working on a new project, and I encountered a block. I was uncertain if there was a proper method to craft some of the fearful things the story includes. Going through this book, I realized that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the novel is a grim journey into the thoughts of a murderer, Quentin P, inspired by a notorious figure, the criminal who killed and mutilated numerous individuals in a city between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, Dahmer was fixated with making a compliant victim who would stay him and carried out several horrific efforts to accomplish it.

The acts the novel describes are appalling, but similarly terrifying is the emotional authenticity. Quentin P’s dreadful, fragmented world is simply narrated in spare prose, details omitted. The audience is immersed caught in his thoughts, compelled to witness ideas and deeds that appal. The alien nature of his thinking is like a bodily jolt – or being stranded in an empty realm. Entering this book is not just reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from a gifted writer

When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and subsequently commenced having night terrors. Once, the terror included a dream in which I was stuck in a box and, as I roused, I found that I had removed a part off the window, seeking to leave. That home was decaying; when it rained heavily the entranceway became inundated, fly larvae came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a large rat scaled the curtains in that space.

After an acquaintance gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living with my parents, but the narrative of the house high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to me, homesick at that time. It’s a book featuring a possessed noisy, atmospheric home and a girl who ingests limestone from the shoreline. I loved the novel immensely and returned again and again to its pages, consistently uncovering {something