Frightening Novelists Reveal the Most Frightening Narratives They have Actually Experienced

Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by a master of suspense

I discovered this story years ago and it has haunted me since then. The so-called “summer people” happen to be the Allisons from New York, who lease an identical isolated country cottage each year. This time, rather than returning home, they decide to prolong their vacation a few more weeks – something that seems to disturb all the locals in the adjacent village. Each repeats a similar vague warning that nobody has ever stayed by the water beyond the holiday. Regardless, the couple insist to remain, and that’s when situations commence to get increasingly weird. The man who brings fuel declines to provide to them. Nobody is willing to supply food to the cottage, and when the family try to drive into town, the car refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the power within the device die, and when night comes, “the two old people crowded closely in their summer cottage and expected”. What might be they waiting for? What might the locals be aware of? Each occasion I peruse this author’s chilling and influential story, I remember that the finest fright stems from the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this short story two people travel to an ordinary beach community where bells ring continuously, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and inexplicable. The opening truly frightening episode takes place after dark, at the time they choose to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the sea. The beach is there, the scent exists of decaying seafood and brine, there are waves, but the sea seems phantom, or another thing and worse. It’s just deeply malevolent and every time I visit to the shore in the evening I recall this narrative which spoiled the ocean after dark for me – in a good way.

The newlyweds – she’s very young, he’s not – go back to their lodging and find out the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, necro-orgy and mortality and youth encounters grim ballet bedlam. It is a disturbing reflection about longing and decline, a pair of individuals maturing in tandem as partners, the bond and violence and gentleness of marriage.

Not only the scariest, but perhaps among the finest concise narratives available, and an individual preference. I read it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of these tales to be published in Argentina several years back.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I perused Zombie near the water in France recently. Even with the bright weather I felt a chill within me. I also felt the excitement of excitement. I was writing my latest book, and I faced a wall. I didn’t know if it was possible an effective approach to compose certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Experiencing this novel, I realized that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the book is a grim journey within the psyche of a murderer, Quentin P, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who killed and cut apart 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee during a specific period. Infamously, the killer was obsessed with creating a zombie sex slave who would never leave him and made many grisly attempts to do so.

The actions the book depicts are horrific, but similarly terrifying is its own mental realism. The character’s awful, shattered existence is simply narrated with concise language, details omitted. You is plunged stuck in his mind, forced to see mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The strangeness of his mind resembles a physical shock – or getting lost in an empty realm. Entering this book is not just reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from a gifted writer

In my early years, I was a somnambulist and eventually began having night terrors. At one point, the fear involved a nightmare where I was confined within an enclosure and, as I roused, I discovered that I had torn off a piece out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That house was falling apart; during heavy rain the entranceway filled with water, insect eggs fell from the ceiling on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a large rat climbed the drapes in that space.

Once a companion gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere at my family home, but the tale regarding the building located on the coastline appeared known to myself, nostalgic as I felt. It’s a story concerning a ghostly noisy, atmospheric home and a young woman who consumes calcium from the cliffs. I cherished the novel deeply and came back frequently to it, always finding {something