Frightening Authors Share the Most Terrifying Tales They've Actually Read

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by a master of suspense

I discovered this narrative some time back and it has haunted me since then. The named seasonal visitors happen to be a couple from the city, who rent the same isolated lakeside house every summer. This time, rather than heading back to urban life, they decide to prolong their holiday a few more weeks – a decision that to disturb everyone in the surrounding community. All pass on the same veiled caution that nobody has ever stayed in the area after the holiday. Nonetheless, the couple are resolved to not leave, and at that point events begin to get increasingly weird. The man who delivers the kerosene refuses to sell to them. No one will deliver groceries to the cabin, and at the time they try to go to the village, the car fails to start. A storm gathers, the power in the radio die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple huddled together inside their cabin and waited”. What could be this couple anticipating? What might the townspeople know? Each occasion I revisit Jackson’s unnerving and influential narrative, I’m reminded that the top terror originates in that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this short story two people go to a typical beach community where bells ring constantly, a constant chiming that is irritating and puzzling. The opening extremely terrifying scene takes place during the evening, as they decide to take a walk and they can’t find the ocean. Sand is present, there’s the smell of rotting fish and brine, waves crash, but the sea appears spectral, or something else and more dreadful. It’s just deeply malevolent and whenever I travel to a beach at night I think about this tale that destroyed the beach in the evening in my view – in a good way.

The newlyweds – she’s very young, he’s not – head back to their lodging and discover why the bells ring, in a long sequence of confinement, necro-orgy and death-and-the-maiden intersects with grim ballet pandemonium. It’s an unnerving meditation about longing and decay, a pair of individuals maturing in tandem as partners, the attachment and violence and affection of marriage.

Not merely the most terrifying, but probably a top example of short stories in existence, and an individual preference. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of this author’s works to be released in this country in 2011.

Catriona Ward

Zombie from an esteemed writer

I perused Zombie by a pool in the French countryside recently. Despite the sunshine I felt cold creep within me. Additionally, I sensed the excitement of fascination. I was working on a new project, and I faced an obstacle. I wasn’t sure if it was possible a proper method to write certain terrifying elements the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I realized that there was a way.

Released decades ago, the book is a grim journey within the psyche of a young serial killer, the protagonist, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who slaughtered and dismembered numerous individuals in a city over a decade. Infamously, the killer was fixated with creating a compliant victim that would remain by his side and attempted numerous grisly attempts to achieve this.

The actions the book depicts are horrific, but just as scary is its mental realism. The protagonist’s terrible, fragmented world is simply narrated in spare prose, details omitted. You is plunged trapped in his consciousness, compelled to witness mental processes and behaviors that shock. The foreignness of his psyche resembles a bodily jolt – or getting lost in an empty realm. Starting this story is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and subsequently commenced experiencing nightmares. On one occasion, the fear included a nightmare during which I was stuck within an enclosure and, as I roused, I realized that I had ripped a part off the window, attempting to escape. That building was decaying; during heavy rain the ground floor corridor became inundated, maggots came down from the roof onto the bed, and at one time a large rat climbed the drapes in the bedroom.

Once a companion gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out at my family home, but the tale about the home perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable in my view, nostalgic as I was. It is a story about a haunted clamorous, emotional house and a young woman who ingests limestone from the shoreline. I cherished the book immensely and came back again and again to its pages, consistently uncovering {something