Scary Novelists Discuss the Most Terrifying Stories They've Ever Experienced

Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I discovered this tale long ago and it has lingered with me from that moment. The titular vacationers are the Allisons urban dwellers, who lease the same isolated country cottage annually. On this occasion, rather than returning home, they decide to lengthen their holiday an extra month – something that seems to disturb everyone in the nearby town. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that no one has ever stayed by the water past the holiday. Even so, they are resolved to remain, and that is the moment events begin to get increasingly weird. The person who delivers oil won’t sell to the couple. Nobody is willing to supply food to the cottage, and at the time the Allisons attempt to go to the village, the car won’t start. A tempest builds, the power within the device fade, and as darkness falls, “the two old people clung to each other in their summer cottage and waited”. What could be they expecting? What could the locals know? Every time I peruse this author’s unnerving and thought-provoking tale, I’m reminded that the best horror originates in the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a couple journey to an ordinary seaside town where church bells toll constantly, an incessant ringing that is annoying and unexplainable. The opening extremely terrifying scene takes place after dark, at the time they opt to take a walk and they can’t find the sea. There’s sand, the scent exists of rotting fish and seawater, surf is audible, but the ocean is a ghost, or another thing and worse. It is simply profoundly ominous and each occasion I visit to the shore after dark I think about this narrative that destroyed the beach in the evening in my view – in a good way.

The newlyweds – the woman is adolescent, the husband is older – go back to the hotel and find out the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and demise and innocence encounters dance of death bedlam. It’s a chilling contemplation on desire and deterioration, two people growing old jointly as partners, the attachment and brutality and gentleness within wedlock.

Not just the most terrifying, but likely one of the best short stories available, and a personal favourite. I read it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of these tales to be published in Argentina in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into Zombie beside the swimming area in the French countryside a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I sensed cold creep within me. Additionally, I sensed the thrill of anticipation. I was composing a new project, and I faced a block. I wasn’t sure if there was an effective approach to write some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Going through this book, I realized that it was possible.

Published in 1995, the book is a dark flight within the psyche of a criminal, Quentin P, inspired by a notorious figure, the serial killer who murdered and mutilated numerous individuals in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, Dahmer was fixated with making a compliant victim that would remain with him and made many grisly attempts to achieve this.

The acts the novel describes are horrific, but similarly terrifying is its psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s terrible, shattered existence is simply narrated in spare prose, identities hidden. The audience is plunged trapped in his consciousness, forced to see ideas and deeds that appal. The foreignness of his psyche feels like a bodily jolt – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Going into this story feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and subsequently commenced having night terrors. At one point, the horror involved a vision in which I was confined inside a container and, as I roused, I found that I had ripped the slat off the window, trying to get out. That house was crumbling; when storms came the entranceway became inundated, insect eggs dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and once a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in that space.

Once a companion handed me the story, I had moved out with my parents, but the story about the home high on the Dover cliffs appeared known to myself, homesick as I felt. It’s a novel about a haunted clamorous, sentimental building and a young woman who eats calcium from the cliffs. I adored the novel immensely and went back repeatedly to the story, consistently uncovering {something