Frightening Novelists Discuss the Most Terrifying Tales They've Ever Read

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense

I encountered this story years ago and it has haunted me from that moment. The titular “summer people” are a family urban dwellers, who lease a particular off-grid lakeside house every summer. On this occasion, rather than heading back home, they choose to lengthen their vacation an extra month – something that seems to unsettle all the locals in the nearby town. Everyone conveys the same veiled caution that nobody has lingered at the lake past the holiday. Regardless, the Allisons are resolved to stay, and that is the moment situations commence to grow more bizarre. The person who brings oil won’t sell to them. Not a single person is willing to supply supplies to the cottage, and at the time the family endeavor to go to the village, the car refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the power within the device fade, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals clung to each other in their summer cottage and expected”. What are they waiting for? What do the townspeople know? Whenever I read Jackson’s unnerving and inspiring story, I recall that the top terror comes from what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this short story a couple journey to an ordinary coastal village where bells ring constantly, a perpetual pealing that is annoying and unexplainable. The initial very scary moment happens at night, as they opt to take a walk and they can’t find the ocean. Sand is present, there is the odor of decaying seafood and salt, waves crash, but the water appears spectral, or something else and worse. It’s just deeply malevolent and whenever I travel to a beach at night I remember this narrative which spoiled the ocean after dark to my mind – in a good way.

The recent spouses – the wife is youthful, he’s not – head back to the hotel and discover the reason for the chiming, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and demise and innocence encounters grim ballet bedlam. It’s an unnerving contemplation about longing and decay, a pair of individuals aging together as spouses, the attachment and brutality and gentleness within wedlock.

Not just the most terrifying, but probably a top example of brief tales out there, and a beloved choice. I encountered it en español, in the debut release of Aickman stories to appear in Argentina several years back.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer

I delved into this narrative beside the swimming area in France a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I sensed an icy feeling over me. I also felt the thrill of anticipation. I was composing a new project, and I had hit a wall. I was uncertain whether there existed an effective approach to compose various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Experiencing this novel, I saw that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a bleak exploration within the psyche of a young serial killer, the main character, inspired by a notorious figure, the murderer who murdered and mutilated numerous individuals in Milwaukee over a decade. Infamously, Dahmer was consumed with producing a compliant victim who would never leave him and made many horrific efforts to accomplish it.

The deeds the book depicts are horrific, but just as scary is its own psychological persuasiveness. The character’s dreadful, broken reality is directly described with concise language, names redacted. The audience is immersed stuck in his mind, compelled to witness mental processes and behaviors that appal. The strangeness of his psyche feels like a tangible impact – or getting lost on a desolate planet. Starting Zombie feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching from a gifted writer

In my early years, I was a somnambulist and later started having night terrors. On one occasion, the fear included a vision where I was confined in a box and, upon awakening, I realized that I had removed the slat out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That building was falling apart; when storms came the downstairs hall flooded, maggots dropped from above onto the bed, and once a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

After an acquaintance gave me this author’s book, I had moved out at my family home, but the tale about the home high on the Dover cliffs appeared known to me, nostalgic at that time. This is a story concerning a ghostly noisy, sentimental building and a girl who eats limestone off the rocks. I loved the novel immensely and came back again and again to its pages, always finding {something