Frightening Novelists Discuss the Most Frightening Stories They have Actually Read

Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from a master of suspense

I discovered this story long ago and it has stayed with me from that moment. The named seasonal visitors are a family from the city, who lease the same remote country cottage every summer. This time, instead of heading back to the city, they opt to extend their vacation a few more weeks – an action that appears to unsettle everyone in the surrounding community. Everyone conveys the same veiled caution that not a soul has ever stayed at the lake beyond the holiday. Regardless, the couple insist to not leave, and that’s when things start to become stranger. The person who brings the kerosene declines to provide to the couple. No one will deliver groceries to their home, and when the Allisons try to go to the village, the automobile fails to start. A storm gathers, the power of their radio fade, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple huddled together inside their cabin and waited”. What could be they anticipating? What could the locals know? Every time I revisit this author’s chilling and thought-provoking tale, I recall that the top terror stems from what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative two people travel to a common beach community where church bells toll continuously, a constant chiming that is annoying and inexplicable. The initial extremely terrifying scene happens during the evening, at the time they decide to walk around and they fail to see the sea. Sand is present, the scent exists of decaying seafood and brine, waves crash, but the ocean is a ghost, or something else and more dreadful. It is truly insanely sinister and every time I travel to the shore after dark I remember this narrative that ruined the sea at night for me – positively.

The recent spouses – she’s very young, he’s not – head back to their lodging and discover the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and death-and-the-maiden encounters dance of death bedlam. It’s a chilling contemplation on desire and decline, a pair of individuals aging together as spouses, the attachment and aggression and affection of marriage.

Not only the scariest, but likely a top example of concise narratives available, and an individual preference. I read it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of these tales to be published in this country several years back.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I perused Zombie near the water in the French countryside in 2020. Despite the sunshine I experienced an icy feeling within me. Additionally, I sensed the excitement of anticipation. I was composing my latest book, and I had hit a wall. I didn’t know if it was possible a proper method to compose various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Experiencing this novel, I realized that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a bleak exploration into the thoughts of a criminal, the protagonist, modeled after an infamous individual, the murderer who slaughtered and dismembered multiple victims in a city over a decade. As is well-known, this person was fixated with making a submissive individual who would stay him and carried out several macabre trials to achieve this.

The actions the story tells are terrible, but just as scary is the psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s terrible, fragmented world is plainly told using minimal words, identities hidden. You is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, forced to see thoughts and actions that shock. The foreignness of his psyche feels like a physical shock – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Entering this story feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel by a gifted writer

In my early years, I sleepwalked and later started suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the terror involved a dream where I was trapped within an enclosure and, upon awakening, I found that I had removed a part out of the window frame, trying to get out. That building was crumbling; when storms came the downstairs hall became inundated, maggots came down from the roof 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 story about the home perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable to me, longing at that time. It’s a book featuring a possessed clamorous, sentimental building and a young woman who consumes chalk from the shoreline. I loved the novel immensely and went back frequently to the story, each time discovering {something