Scary Writers Reveal the Scariest Stories They have Ever Experienced
Andrew Michael Hurley
The Summer People from Shirley Jackson
I encountered this narrative some time back and it has haunted me ever since. The named seasonal visitors happen to be a family from New York, who occupy an identical off-grid country cottage annually. On this occasion, instead of heading back to urban life, they choose to prolong their holiday an extra month – a decision that to disturb everyone in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys the same veiled caution that not a soul has lingered at the lake past the end of summer. Nonetheless, the couple are resolved to remain, and that’s when things start to get increasingly weird. The individual who supplies the kerosene refuses to sell to the couple. Not a single person will deliver supplies to the cabin, and as the Allisons attempt to travel to the community, the car won’t start. A tempest builds, the batteries of their radio fade, and with the arrival of dusk, “the aged individuals clung to each other inside their cabin and waited”. What could be this couple expecting? What do the residents be aware of? Every time I peruse this author’s unnerving and thought-provoking tale, I remember that the best horror comes from what’s left undisclosed.
Mariana Enríquez
An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman
In this brief tale a couple travel to a typical beach community where bells ring the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is irritating and puzzling. The initial truly frightening moment takes place at night, at the time they choose to walk around and they fail to see the sea. Sand is present, there is the odor of putrid marine life and seawater, waves crash, but the ocean is a ghost, or a different entity and even more alarming. It’s just insanely sinister and each occasion I visit to the coast in the evening I recall this narrative which spoiled the ocean after dark to my mind – in a good way.
The recent spouses – she’s very young, he’s not – go back to the inn and find out why the bells ring, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and death-and-the-maiden encounters danse macabre chaos. It’s a chilling contemplation regarding craving and decline, two bodies growing old jointly as a couple, the connection and aggression and affection of marriage.
Not just the most frightening, but perhaps one of the best brief tales out there, and an individual preference. I read it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of these tales to be released in this country a decade ago.
A Prominent Novelist
A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates
I read Zombie by a pool in the French countryside a few years ago. Although it was sunny I experienced cold creep within me. I also experienced the excitement of fascination. I was working on a new project, and I encountered a block. I wasn’t sure if there was a proper method to craft certain terrifying elements the story includes. Going through this book, I realized that it was possible.
Published in 1995, the book is a grim journey within the psyche of a criminal, the main character, inspired by a notorious figure, the murderer who murdered and dismembered multiple victims in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, the killer was fixated with producing a compliant victim that would remain with him and attempted numerous grisly attempts to do so.
The acts the story tells are terrible, but similarly terrifying is its own psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s terrible, fragmented world is simply narrated in spare prose, details omitted. The reader is plunged caught in his thoughts, forced to see mental processes and behaviors that shock. The alien nature of his thinking resembles a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated on a desolate planet. Entering this book feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.
Daisy Johnson
A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi
In my early years, I was a somnambulist and later started suffering from bad dreams. Once, the terror included a vision during which I was confined inside a container and, as I roused, I realized that I had ripped a piece out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That home was decaying; when storms came the entranceway became inundated, fly larvae came down from the roof into the bedroom, and at one time a big rodent climbed the drapes in the bedroom.
When a friend handed me the story, I had moved out with my parents, but the tale about the home perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable to me, homesick at that time. It’s a novel concerning a ghostly noisy, atmospheric home and a young woman who consumes calcium from the cliffs. I adored the book immensely and came back repeatedly to the story, consistently uncovering {something
