Frightening Authors Discuss the Most Frightening Narratives They have Actually Read

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I encountered this story long ago and it has haunted me ever since. The titular “summer people” turn out to be the Allisons from the city, who occupy an identical remote lakeside house every summer. During this visit, rather than going back to the city, they choose to lengthen their stay for a month longer – a decision that to disturb all the locals in the adjacent village. All pass on an identical cryptic advice that no one has remained by the water after the holiday. Nonetheless, they insist to remain, and that’s when things start to get increasingly weird. The individual who supplies oil declines to provide for them. No one agrees to bring supplies to the cabin, and as the Allisons try to go to the village, the automobile refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the power within the device fade, and when night comes, “the aged individuals crowded closely inside their cabin and waited”. What are the Allisons waiting for? What might the locals know? Every time I revisit the writer’s chilling and inspiring story, I recall that the best horror stems from what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a pair journey to an ordinary coastal village where bells ring the whole time, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and inexplicable. The first truly frightening episode occurs at night, at the time they decide to go for a stroll and they can’t find the water. There’s sand, there is the odor of putrid marine life and seawater, surf is audible, but the water seems phantom, or a different entity and more dreadful. It is simply deeply malevolent and each occasion I visit to the shore in the evening I remember this tale which spoiled the beach in the evening for me – favorably.

The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, the husband is older – go back to the inn and learn why the bells ring, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and mortality and youth intersects with dance of death bedlam. It’s a chilling reflection about longing and decline, two bodies aging together as partners, the connection and brutality and affection of marriage.

Not merely the scariest, but perhaps among the finest concise narratives in existence, and a personal favourite. I experienced it en español, in the first edition of Aickman stories to be published in this country several years back.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates

I read this book by a pool in the French countryside a few years ago. Although it was sunny I felt cold creep within me. Additionally, I sensed the thrill of excitement. I was composing my latest book, and I faced an obstacle. I was uncertain whether there existed any good way to craft some of the fearful things the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I saw that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a grim journey through the mind of a young serial killer, the protagonist, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who slaughtered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in the Midwest over a decade. As is well-known, the killer was obsessed with making a zombie sex slave who would stay him and attempted numerous grisly attempts to achieve this.

The deeds the novel describes are appalling, but equally frightening is its own psychological persuasiveness. The protagonist’s awful, broken reality is simply narrated with concise language, identities hidden. You is plunged trapped in his consciousness, forced to observe ideas and deeds that appal. The foreignness of his psyche resembles a tangible impact – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Starting this story feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by a gifted writer

In my early years, I was a somnambulist and eventually began having night terrors. At one point, the terror included a nightmare in which I was confined inside a container and, upon awakening, I realized that I had ripped the slat from the window, attempting to escape. That house was crumbling; during heavy rain the downstairs hall flooded, fly larvae dropped from above into the bedroom, and once a big rodent scaled the curtains in that space.

Once a companion gave me this author’s book, I was no longer living at my family home, but the story regarding the building located on the coastline seemed recognizable in my view, nostalgic as I felt. It’s a novel concerning a ghostly loud, emotional house and a young woman who eats limestone from the shoreline. I loved the book immensely and came back repeatedly to the story, each time discovering {something