Frightening Novelists Share the Most Frightening Narratives They have Actually Experienced

Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by a master of suspense

I read this tale years ago and it has haunted me from that moment. The titular vacationers turn out to be a couple urban dwellers, who rent a particular isolated rural cabin each year. During this visit, instead of returning home, they decide to lengthen their stay a few more weeks – a decision that to unsettle all the locals in the surrounding community. Each repeats a similar vague warning that not a soul has lingered by the water after the end of summer. Even so, the couple insist to remain, and that is the moment situations commence to become stranger. The person who brings fuel won’t sell for them. Nobody is willing to supply supplies to their home, and as the Allisons try to drive into town, their vehicle fails to start. A storm gathers, the batteries within the device diminish, and when night comes, “the aged individuals crowded closely in their summer cottage and waited”. What might be the Allisons anticipating? What could the townspeople know? Every time I revisit this author’s unnerving and influential story, I remember that the best horror comes from that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this brief tale two people journey to a common seaside town in which chimes sound constantly, a constant chiming that is irritating and puzzling. The opening extremely terrifying episode takes place after dark, at the time they decide to take a walk and they fail to see the water. There’s sand, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and brine, there are waves, but the sea appears spectral, or another thing and even more alarming. It is truly deeply malevolent and whenever I travel to the shore at night I recall this tale that destroyed the ocean after dark to my mind – in a good way.

The young couple – she’s very young, the man is mature – head back to their lodging and discover the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and demise and innocence meets grim ballet bedlam. It is a disturbing contemplation regarding craving and decline, two people aging together as spouses, the connection and aggression and affection of marriage.

Not just the most frightening, but perhaps among the finest short stories in existence, and a personal favourite. I read it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of this author’s works to appear in this country several years back.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer

I read Zombie by a pool in the French countryside a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I experienced an icy feeling over me. I also felt the thrill of fascination. I was composing a new project, and I faced a wall. I wasn’t sure if it was possible any good way to write certain terrifying elements the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I understood that it was possible.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a grim journey through the mind of a murderer, the protagonist, based on an infamous individual, the murderer who murdered and cut apart numerous individuals in Milwaukee during a specific period. Infamously, this person was fixated with creating a zombie sex slave that would remain him and carried out several grisly attempts to achieve this.

The acts the story tells are horrific, but just as scary is its own psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s dreadful, broken reality is plainly told with concise language, identities hidden. The audience is immersed caught in his thoughts, compelled to observe mental processes and behaviors that shock. The foreignness of his psyche is like a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Starting Zombie is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the fear featured a nightmare where I was trapped in a box and, upon awakening, I discovered that I had removed a part out of the window frame, attempting to escape. That home was crumbling; when it rained heavily the entranceway became inundated, insect eggs dropped from above onto the bed, and on one occasion a large rat scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

Once a companion presented me with the story, I was no longer living with my parents, but the narrative of the house located on the coastline appeared known to me, longing at that time. It is a book concerning a ghostly noisy, atmospheric home and a female character who eats chalk from the shoreline. I adored the novel so much and came back again and again to its pages, always finding {something