Horror Writers Share the Scariest Narratives They've Actually Read
Andrew Michael Hurley
The Summer People from Shirley Jackson
I encountered this tale long ago and it has stayed with me from that moment. The so-called “summer people” are a family from New York, who occupy a particular remote rural cabin each year. During this visit, instead of heading back home, they opt to lengthen their holiday for a month longer – an action that appears to alarm everyone in the surrounding community. All pass on a similar vague warning that nobody has ever stayed in the area past the end of summer. Nonetheless, the Allisons are resolved to stay, and at that point things start to get increasingly weird. The individual who supplies oil refuses to sell for them. No one is willing to supply groceries to the cottage, and as the Allisons endeavor to travel to the community, the automobile fails to start. Bad weather approaches, the batteries in the radio die, and when night comes, “the aged individuals crowded closely inside their cabin and waited”. What might be the Allisons expecting? What might the residents understand? Whenever I read this author’s disturbing and influential tale, I recall that the top terror originates in what’s left undisclosed.
An Acclaimed Writer
Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman
In this concise narrative two people travel to a typical beach community where bells ring the whole time, an incessant ringing that is irritating and inexplicable. The initial extremely terrifying moment takes place after dark, at the time they opt to go for a stroll and they can’t find the water. The beach is there, the scent exists of decaying seafood and seawater, surf is audible, but the ocean seems phantom, or something else and even more alarming. It’s just insanely sinister and whenever I visit to a beach in the evening I think about this narrative that destroyed the ocean after dark in my view – positively.
The recent spouses – she’s very young, the husband is older – go back to their lodging and discover why the bells ring, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, necro-orgy and death-and-the-maiden intersects with danse macabre pandemonium. It’s an unnerving contemplation on desire and decay, two bodies growing old jointly as partners, the bond and violence and tenderness within wedlock.
Not only the most frightening, but perhaps a top example of short stories available, and a personal favourite. I read it en español, in the first edition of this author’s works to appear in this country in 2011.
A Prominent Novelist
A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer
I delved into this narrative near the water in the French countryside recently. Even with the bright weather I felt cold creep within me. Additionally, I sensed the thrill of excitement. I was writing my latest book, and I had hit an obstacle. I wasn’t sure if there was an effective approach to compose certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Going through this book, I saw that it was possible.
First printed in the nineties, the story is a grim journey within the psyche of a young serial killer, Quentin P, modeled after an infamous individual, the criminal who murdered and dismembered numerous individuals in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, this person was fixated with making a zombie sex slave that would remain with him and made many macabre trials to achieve this.
The deeds the story tells are horrific, but equally frightening is the psychological persuasiveness. The character’s awful, broken reality is plainly told in spare prose, identities hidden. The audience is sunk deep stuck in his mind, forced to witness mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The alien nature of his psyche is like a bodily jolt – or being stranded in an empty realm. Entering this story feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.
Daisy Johnson
White Is for Witching by a gifted writer
When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and eventually began having night terrors. On one occasion, the horror involved a nightmare during which I was trapped in a box and, when I woke up, I realized that I had torn off a piece from the window, trying to get out. That home was decaying; during heavy rain the ground floor corridor filled with water, insect eggs came down from the roof into the bedroom, and once a big rodent ascended the window coverings in the bedroom.
Once a companion presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere in my childhood residence, but the tale of the house high on the Dover cliffs appeared known in my view, longing as I was. This is a novel about a haunted noisy, sentimental building and a female character who eats calcium off the rocks. I adored the story deeply and came back frequently to it, consistently uncovering {something