Frightening Authors Share the Most Frightening Tales They have Ever Read

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson

I read this story some time back and it has lingered with me since then. The named vacationers are a family from New York, who lease the same off-grid country cottage every summer. During this visit, instead of heading back to urban life, they opt to lengthen their stay a few more weeks – an action that appears to unsettle everyone in the surrounding community. Each repeats an identical cryptic advice that no one has remained in the area beyond the holiday. Regardless, the Allisons are determined to not leave, and that’s when situations commence to get increasingly weird. The individual who brings oil won’t sell to them. No one is willing to supply supplies to their home, and as the Allisons endeavor to travel to the community, their vehicle refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the batteries of their radio diminish, and when night comes, “the elderly couple crowded closely within their rental and waited”. What could be they waiting for? What do the residents know? Whenever I peruse the writer’s disturbing and inspiring tale, I remember that the best horror originates in what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from a noted author

In this brief tale two people journey to a common beach community where church bells toll constantly, a perpetual pealing that is irritating and puzzling. The opening very scary scene takes place at night, as they opt to walk around and they can’t find the water. There’s sand, the scent exists of decaying seafood and seawater, waves crash, but the water appears spectral, or something else and more dreadful. It is simply deeply malevolent and every time I travel to a beach after dark I think about this story which spoiled the beach in the evening in my view – positively.

The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – go back to the hotel and learn the reason for the chiming, during a prolonged scene of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and mortality and youth encounters grim ballet pandemonium. It is a disturbing contemplation about longing and deterioration, a pair of individuals maturing in tandem as partners, the connection and brutality and tenderness within wedlock.

Not just the scariest, but perhaps one of the best short stories in existence, and an individual preference. I experienced it in Spanish, in the first edition of Aickman stories to be released in Argentina a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates

I read Zombie beside the swimming area overseas a few years ago. Although it was sunny I experienced an icy feeling over me. I also felt the electricity of fascination. I was working on a new project, and I encountered an obstacle. I didn’t know whether there existed an effective approach to craft various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Going through this book, I saw that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the story is a dark flight into the thoughts of a criminal, the protagonist, inspired by a notorious figure, the criminal who slaughtered and cut apart numerous individuals in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, the killer was consumed with making a zombie sex slave that would remain with him and made many grisly attempts to do so.

The acts the novel describes are terrible, but equally frightening is the emotional authenticity. Quentin P’s dreadful, shattered existence is simply narrated in spare prose, identities hidden. The audience is immersed stuck in his mind, compelled to observe thoughts and actions that shock. The strangeness of his thinking resembles a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated on a desolate planet. Entering Zombie is less like reading than a full body experience. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and subsequently commenced suffering from bad dreams. Once, the horror involved a vision during which I was stuck within an enclosure and, as I roused, I found that I had torn off a part out of the window frame, attempting to escape. That house was crumbling; when it rained heavily the entranceway flooded, maggots came down from the roof into the bedroom, and once a big rodent climbed the drapes in the bedroom.

When a friend handed me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere at my family home, but the story of the house perched on the cliffs appeared known to me, longing as I felt. It is a book about a haunted loud, atmospheric home and a female character who ingests calcium from the cliffs. I cherished the story so much and came back frequently to its pages, always finding {something