Horror Novelists Reveal the Scariest Narratives They have Actually Encountered

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense

I read this story years ago and it has stayed with me from that moment. The so-called seasonal visitors happen to be a couple from New York, who occupy a particular isolated country cottage every summer. This time, instead of heading back to the city, they decide to lengthen their stay an extra month – an action that appears to unsettle all the locals in the adjacent village. Each repeats an identical cryptic advice that no one has ever stayed in the area after the end of summer. Regardless, they insist to stay, and that is the moment events begin to get increasingly weird. The person who delivers oil declines to provide to the couple. Nobody agrees to bring food to the cottage, and at the time they attempt to drive into town, the automobile fails to start. A tempest builds, the power within the device diminish, and when night comes, “the elderly couple clung to each other in their summer cottage and waited”. What are this couple waiting for? What could the residents understand? Every time I read the writer’s disturbing and thought-provoking tale, I’m reminded that the top terror comes from what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a pair journey to a typical coastal village in which chimes sound constantly, a constant chiming that is annoying and inexplicable. The initial extremely terrifying moment happens after dark, at the time they decide to take a walk and they are unable to locate the sea. The beach is there, there is the odor of putrid marine life and salt, waves crash, but the water appears spectral, or a different entity and worse. It is truly insanely sinister and each occasion I go to a beach after dark I recall this story which spoiled the beach in the evening for me – favorably.

The newlyweds – the woman is adolescent, he’s not – head back to their lodging and find out why the bells ring, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and mortality and youth meets grim ballet pandemonium. It’s an unnerving contemplation on desire and deterioration, two people aging together as spouses, the bond and aggression and gentleness of marriage.

Not only the most frightening, but perhaps among the finest short stories out there, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of Aickman stories to be published locally a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates

I perused Zombie near the water in France recently. Despite the sunshine I felt cold creep over me. I also experienced the thrill of excitement. I was composing a new project, and I had hit a block. I was uncertain whether there existed a proper method to compose certain terrifying elements the story includes. Reading Zombie, I saw that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a dark flight into the thoughts of a young serial killer, Quentin P, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who slaughtered and mutilated 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee over a decade. Notoriously, Dahmer was fixated with producing a zombie sex slave who would never leave by his side and carried out several macabre trials to achieve this.

The acts the book depicts are horrific, but just as scary is the psychological persuasiveness. The character’s awful, broken reality is directly described in spare prose, names redacted. The audience is plunged trapped in his consciousness, forced to witness mental processes and behaviors that shock. The foreignness of his thinking resembles a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Starting Zombie feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

During my youth, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the terror featured a dream during which I was confined in a box and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had ripped a piece from the window, attempting to escape. That building was falling apart; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall flooded, maggots came down from the roof into the bedroom, and on one occasion a large rat ascended the window coverings in the bedroom.

Once a companion presented me with the story, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the narrative about the home perched on the cliffs appeared known in my view, homesick as I was. It’s a book concerning a ghostly noisy, emotional house and a girl who ingests calcium from the shoreline. I loved the story immensely and returned again and again to it, each time discovering {something