Horror Writers Share the Scariest Narratives They have Ever Experienced
Andrew Michael Hurley
The Summer People from a master of suspense
I read this story years ago and it has haunted me from that moment. The named seasonal visitors happen to be a family from New York, who occupy the same remote rural cabin annually. During this visit, in place of returning to the city, they opt to lengthen their holiday a few more weeks – a decision that to alarm each resident in the nearby town. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that no one has ever stayed by the water beyond the end of summer. Nonetheless, the couple are resolved to not leave, and at that point things start to get increasingly weird. The man who brings oil declines to provide for them. Nobody agrees to bring food to their home, and at the time the family attempt to drive into town, their vehicle fails to start. A tempest builds, the energy of their radio die, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple crowded closely in their summer cottage and expected”. What could be the Allisons waiting for? What could the locals be aware of? Whenever I read Jackson’s disturbing and influential story, I remember that the best horror originates in the unspoken.
Mariana Enríquez
An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman
In this short story two people journey to a typical coastal village where church bells toll constantly, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and unexplainable. The opening extremely terrifying moment occurs during the evening, at the time they choose to walk around and they fail to see the ocean. The beach is there, there’s the smell of rotting fish and brine, waves crash, but the water is a ghost, or a different entity and worse. It is simply profoundly ominous and each occasion I travel to the coast at night I think about this narrative which spoiled the sea at night for me – favorably.
The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, the husband is older – go back to the inn and find out why the bells ring, through an extended episode of confinement, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden encounters grim ballet bedlam. It is a disturbing contemplation on desire and deterioration, two bodies growing old jointly as spouses, the bond and brutality and tenderness within wedlock.
Not merely the most frightening, but probably one of the best concise narratives out there, and a personal favourite. I read it en español, in the first edition of these tales to be published in this country several years back.
A Prominent Novelist
Zombie from an esteemed writer
I read this book by a pool overseas in 2020. Despite the sunshine I sensed cold creep over me. I also experienced the excitement of fascination. I was writing my third novel, and I encountered a block. I wasn’t sure if there was any good way to craft certain terrifying elements the book contains. Going through this book, I saw that it could be done.
Published in 1995, the story is a dark flight through the mind of a criminal, the main character, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who killed and cut apart multiple victims in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, the killer was fixated with making a submissive individual who would never leave by his side and made many grisly attempts to do so.
The deeds the book depicts are horrific, but similarly terrifying is the emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s dreadful, shattered existence is directly described using minimal words, names redacted. You is plunged caught in his thoughts, obliged to observe mental processes and behaviors that appal. The alien nature of his thinking is like a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Entering this book is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.
Daisy Johnson
A Haunting Novel by a gifted writer
In my early years, I walked in my sleep and subsequently commenced suffering from bad dreams. Once, the terror involved a vision where I was confined in a box and, as I roused, I discovered that I had ripped a part out of the window frame, attempting to escape. That home was crumbling; when storms came the entranceway became inundated, fly larvae came down from the roof into the bedroom, and once a sizeable vermin climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.
When a friend presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere in my childhood residence, but the narrative of the house perched on the cliffs appeared known to myself, longing as I was. This is a book concerning a ghostly clamorous, emotional house and a young woman who consumes chalk from the shoreline. I adored the novel so much and went back frequently to its pages, each time discovering {something