Frightening Novelists Reveal the Most Terrifying Stories They've Ever Read
Andrew Michael Hurley
The Summer People by Shirley Jackson
I read this tale some time back and it has haunted me from that moment. The titular vacationers turn out to be a couple from the city, who lease a particular isolated lakeside house every summer. This time, rather than heading back to urban life, they choose to extend their vacation for a month longer – an action that appears to disturb all the locals in the nearby town. All pass on a similar vague warning that not a soul has ever stayed at the lake beyond Labor Day. Regardless, the Allisons are determined to stay, and that’s when things start to grow more bizarre. The man who supplies fuel refuses to sell for them. Nobody will deliver food to their home, and at the time the Allisons endeavor to travel to the community, their vehicle fails to start. A storm gathers, the energy in the radio fade, and when night comes, “the aged individuals crowded closely in their summer cottage and waited”. What are the Allisons waiting for? What might the locals be aware of? Whenever I revisit this author’s unnerving and thought-provoking narrative, I’m reminded that the best horror originates in that which remains hidden.
An Acclaimed Writer
Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman
In this concise narrative a couple go to an ordinary beach community where bells ring the whole time, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and puzzling. The opening very scary episode takes place after dark, when they choose to take a walk and they fail to see the ocean. The beach is there, there is the odor of rotting fish and seawater, waves crash, but the water appears spectral, or something else and more dreadful. It’s just profoundly ominous and every time I go to the shore after dark I recall this story which spoiled the ocean after dark to my mind – favorably.
The newlyweds – she’s very young, he’s not – go back to the inn and learn why the bells ring, during a prolonged scene of confinement, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden intersects with dance of death chaos. It is a disturbing reflection about longing and deterioration, a pair of individuals aging together as partners, the connection and aggression and gentleness within wedlock.
Not only the most frightening, but probably among the finest brief tales in existence, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to be released locally a decade ago.
Catriona Ward
Zombie by an esteemed writer
I delved into this narrative near the water overseas a few years ago. Although it was sunny I felt a chill within me. I also felt the electricity of anticipation. I was writing a new project, and I encountered a wall. I wasn’t sure if it was possible a proper method to compose certain terrifying elements the story includes. Reading Zombie, I realized that there was a way.
Published in 1995, the novel is a grim journey through the mind of a criminal, Quentin P, modeled after an infamous individual, the criminal who killed and cut apart 17 young men and boys in a city over a decade. Infamously, the killer was fixated with making a compliant victim who would never leave him and carried out several grisly attempts to accomplish it.
The deeds the novel describes are horrific, but equally frightening is the psychological persuasiveness. The protagonist’s dreadful, fragmented world is simply narrated in spare prose, details omitted. The audience is immersed stuck in his mind, forced to witness thoughts and actions that horrify. The strangeness of his psyche is like a physical shock – or getting lost on a desolate planet. Starting this story feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are swallowed whole.
Daisy Johnson
White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi
When I was a child, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced experiencing nightmares. At one point, the fear included a vision during which I was stuck within an enclosure and, as I roused, I realized that I had ripped a part out of the window frame, attempting to escape. That building was decaying; when it rained heavily the entranceway filled with water, maggots dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a sizeable vermin climbed the drapes in the bedroom.
After an acquaintance gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere at my family home, but the narrative of the house located on the coastline felt familiar to myself, nostalgic as I felt. It’s a book featuring a possessed loud, sentimental building and a young woman who consumes chalk from the shoreline. I loved the book so much and came back again and again to it, each time discovering {something
