Frightening Authors Reveal the Most Frightening Narratives They've Actually Encountered

Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from a master of suspense

I encountered this tale long ago and it has lingered with me ever since. The so-called seasonal visitors turn out to be a couple from New York, who lease the same off-grid lakeside house annually. This time, rather than heading back to the city, they opt to lengthen their stay for a month longer – an action that appears to disturb each resident in the surrounding community. Each repeats an identical cryptic advice that nobody has ever stayed in the area past Labor Day. Nonetheless, the couple insist to stay, and that is the moment events begin to get increasingly weird. The man who supplies fuel declines to provide for them. Not a single person will deliver supplies to their home, and at the time the Allisons attempt to travel to the community, the automobile fails to start. A storm gathers, the energy within the device diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the aged individuals crowded closely within their rental and anticipated”. What are they expecting? What might the residents understand? Every time I read this author’s unnerving and influential story, I recall that the finest fright comes from that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes by a noted author

In this short story two people travel to a typical seaside town in which chimes sound constantly, a perpetual pealing that is irritating and inexplicable. The opening very scary scene occurs during the evening, at the time they decide to take a walk and they fail to see the sea. The beach is there, the scent exists of decaying seafood and salt, surf is audible, but the sea appears spectral, or another thing and even more alarming. It is truly deeply malevolent and each occasion I visit to the shore after dark I remember this tale that ruined the ocean after dark for me – favorably.

The recent spouses – the wife is youthful, he’s not – head back to the hotel and learn the cause of the ringing, during a prolonged scene of enclosed spaces, necro-orgy and mortality and youth encounters dance of death pandemonium. It’s a chilling meditation regarding craving and decline, two people growing old jointly as a couple, the connection and violence and gentleness of marriage.

Not just the scariest, but probably one of the best short stories out there, and a beloved choice. I encountered it in Spanish, in the debut release of this author’s works to be released in this country a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this book beside the swimming area overseas in 2020. Although it was sunny I felt a chill over me. I also felt the excitement of fascination. I was writing my third novel, and I encountered a wall. I wasn’t sure if there was an effective approach to craft certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I realized that there was a way.

Released decades ago, the story is a bleak exploration through the mind of a murderer, Quentin P, inspired by a notorious figure, the serial killer who killed and mutilated numerous individuals in a city over a decade. Notoriously, the killer was consumed with making a zombie sex slave who would never leave him and made many horrific efforts to do so.

The acts the story tells are terrible, but equally frightening is the emotional authenticity. Quentin P’s awful, broken reality is directly described with concise language, names redacted. You is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, obliged to observe mental processes and behaviors that appal. The strangeness of his thinking feels like a bodily jolt – or being stranded in an empty realm. Starting this book is less like reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

In my early years, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced having night terrors. On one occasion, the horror involved a nightmare where I was trapped in a box and, when I woke up, I found that I had ripped a part off the window, seeking to leave. That house was falling apart; when it rained heavily the ground floor corridor filled with water, insect eggs came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a big rodent ascended the window coverings in my sister’s room.

When a friend gave me this author’s book, I was no longer living in my childhood residence, but the story of the house high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable in my view, longing as I was. This is a book concerning a ghostly clamorous, emotional house and a girl who eats chalk from the shoreline. I adored the book immensely and went back again and again to the story, each time discovering {something