Frightening Writers Share the Most Terrifying Narratives They have Ever Read

A Renowned Horror Author

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I encountered this story some time back and it has stayed with me ever since. The named vacationers are the Allisons from New York, who lease an identical isolated lakeside house every summer. On this occasion, rather than heading back to the city, they decide to extend their vacation a few more weeks – an action that appears to unsettle all the locals in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys the same veiled caution that not a soul has remained by the water past Labor Day. Regardless, the couple are resolved to not leave, and that is the moment situations commence to grow more bizarre. The man who delivers fuel refuses to sell for them. Nobody agrees to bring food to the cottage, and as they try to go to the village, their vehicle refuses to operate. A storm gathers, the energy of their radio fade, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals huddled together inside their cabin and anticipated”. What might be this couple waiting for? What do the townspeople understand? Every time I revisit the writer’s unnerving and thought-provoking story, I recall that the finest fright comes from the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative two people travel to a typical seaside town where church bells toll continuously, a constant chiming that is irritating and inexplicable. The first very scary scene occurs after dark, at the time they opt to walk around and they fail to see the ocean. Sand is present, there is the odor of rotting fish and salt, waves crash, but the water is a ghost, or a different entity and worse. It’s just profoundly ominous and whenever I go to the shore after dark I recall this tale that destroyed the beach in the evening to my mind – positively.

The young couple – she’s very young, the man is mature – go back to their lodging and learn the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and demise and innocence intersects with danse macabre bedlam. It’s a chilling contemplation about longing and deterioration, two people maturing in tandem as spouses, the bond and aggression and affection within wedlock.

Not only the scariest, but perhaps among the finest brief tales in existence, and an individual preference. I experienced it in Spanish, in the first edition of these tales to be published in Argentina several years back.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer

I read this book by a pool in the French countryside recently. Despite the sunshine I felt a chill over me. I also experienced the thrill of anticipation. I was working on my latest book, and I had hit a wall. I was uncertain if it was possible an effective approach to craft certain terrifying elements the book contains. Reading Zombie, I saw that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a bleak exploration within the psyche of a young serial killer, the protagonist, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who murdered and dismembered numerous individuals in a city over a decade. Notoriously, this person was obsessed with making a compliant victim that would remain by his side and made many macabre trials to do so.

The actions the novel describes are horrific, but similarly terrifying is the mental realism. The protagonist’s awful, fragmented world is simply narrated using minimal words, names redacted. The audience is sunk deep stuck in his mind, compelled to observe thoughts and actions that shock. The foreignness of his psyche resembles a bodily jolt – or getting lost in an empty realm. Starting Zombie is not just reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I sleepwalked and eventually began experiencing nightmares. Once, the horror included a nightmare in which I was confined within an enclosure and, as I roused, I realized that I had removed the slat off the window, trying to get out. That home was falling apart; during heavy rain the entranceway became inundated, insect eggs dropped from above into the bedroom, and at one time a big rodent ascended the window coverings in my sister’s room.

After an acquaintance handed me the story, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the tale about the home located on the coastline appeared known in my view, homesick as I felt. This is a novel about a haunted loud, sentimental building and a girl who eats chalk from the shoreline. I loved the story deeply and returned again and again to its pages, always finding {something