Frightening Writers Discuss the Most Terrifying Tales They have Ever Read

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by a master of suspense

I discovered this narrative years ago and it has lingered with me ever since. The titular “summer people” happen to be a family from New York, who rent a particular isolated rural cabin annually. This time, rather than returning to the city, they opt to prolong their holiday an extra month – an action that appears to unsettle everyone in the nearby town. Each repeats the same veiled caution that no one has ever stayed at the lake past the end of summer. Regardless, the couple insist to stay, and that’s when events begin to become stranger. The person who brings fuel won’t sell for them. Nobody agrees to bring groceries to the cabin, and when the family endeavor to travel to the community, their vehicle fails to start. A storm gathers, the batteries of their radio diminish, and as darkness falls, “the two old people clung to each other inside their cabin and expected”. What could be they expecting? What could the locals be aware of? Every time I read this author’s disturbing and thought-provoking narrative, I remember that the best horror stems from what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative two people go to a common coastal village in which chimes sound the whole time, an incessant ringing that is irritating and unexplainable. The opening extremely terrifying moment happens during the evening, as they choose to take a walk and they are unable to locate the water. There’s sand, the scent exists of putrid marine life and salt, there are waves, but the water is a ghost, or another thing and more dreadful. It is simply profoundly ominous and every time I travel to the shore at night I remember this story that ruined the ocean after dark for me – in a good way.

The young couple – the woman is adolescent, he’s not – go back to the hotel and learn the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden meets grim ballet chaos. It’s a chilling contemplation about longing and decline, two people maturing in tandem as partners, the bond and brutality and tenderness within wedlock.

Not only the scariest, but probably one of the best brief tales in existence, and an individual preference. I experienced it en español, in the first edition of this author’s works to appear in this country in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this narrative beside the swimming area in the French countryside a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I felt an icy feeling within me. I also experienced the thrill of anticipation. I was working on my third novel, and I encountered an obstacle. I didn’t know if it was possible a proper method to compose certain terrifying elements the story includes. Going through this book, I understood that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the story is a dark flight through the mind of a young serial killer, Quentin P, inspired by a notorious figure, the murderer who slaughtered and cut apart 17 young men and boys in a city over a decade. Infamously, the killer was obsessed with creating a compliant victim who would never leave with him and made many macabre trials to achieve this.

The deeds the book depicts are appalling, but just as scary is its psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s dreadful, broken reality is directly described using minimal words, details omitted. You is immersed trapped in his consciousness, obliged to witness thoughts and actions that horrify. The foreignness of his thinking feels like a tangible impact – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Starting this book feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

In my early years, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced having night terrors. On one occasion, the horror included a dream in which I was trapped inside a container and, upon awakening, I found that I had ripped a part out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That building was crumbling; when storms came the entranceway filled with water, maggots fell from the ceiling on to my parents’ bed, and once a large rat scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

After an acquaintance gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out with my parents, but the narrative about the home high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to me, nostalgic as I was. This is a story featuring a possessed clamorous, sentimental building and a girl who eats chalk off the rocks. I loved the story so much and returned repeatedly to it, consistently uncovering {something