Scary Novelists Share the Most Terrifying Narratives They have Ever Read

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by a master of suspense

I encountered this tale years ago and it has haunted me ever since. The so-called “summer people” happen to be a family from the city, who lease a particular off-grid country cottage every summer. During this visit, in place of heading back to the city, they choose to lengthen their holiday for a month longer – a decision that to disturb each resident in the nearby town. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that not a soul has remained by the water beyond Labor Day. Regardless, the couple are resolved to remain, and at that point things start to become stranger. The individual who delivers oil declines to provide for them. Nobody will deliver groceries to their home, and as the family endeavor to go to the village, their vehicle won’t start. A storm gathers, the batteries within the device diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple huddled together in their summer cottage and waited”. What are this couple expecting? What could the townspeople be aware of? Whenever I peruse this author’s chilling and thought-provoking narrative, I remember that the top terror comes from what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a couple go to an ordinary seaside town in which chimes sound continuously, a constant chiming that is annoying and puzzling. The opening truly frightening moment happens at night, when they choose to go for a stroll and they fail to see the sea. The beach is there, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and salt, waves crash, but the ocean seems phantom, or another thing and more dreadful. It’s just profoundly ominous and each occasion I go to the coast at night I recall this story that ruined the ocean after dark for me – in a good way.

The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, he’s not – return to their lodging and learn why the bells ring, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and demise and innocence meets grim ballet chaos. It’s a chilling contemplation on desire and decline, two bodies growing old jointly as a couple, the connection and brutality and gentleness of marriage.

Not merely the most terrifying, but perhaps among the finest brief tales in existence, and an individual preference. I read it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of Aickman stories to appear in Argentina a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this narrative beside the swimming area in the French countryside in 2020. Despite the sunshine I felt a chill within me. Additionally, I sensed the electricity of anticipation. I was composing my latest book, and I faced a block. I didn’t know whether there existed an effective approach to compose various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I saw that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a dark flight within the psyche of a criminal, the protagonist, based on an infamous individual, the criminal who killed and cut apart numerous individuals in the Midwest during a specific period. As is well-known, this person was obsessed with creating a zombie sex slave who would never leave by his side and attempted numerous horrific efforts to do so.

The acts the novel describes are appalling, but just as scary is the emotional authenticity. The character’s dreadful, fragmented world is directly described in spare prose, names redacted. The audience is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, obliged to witness mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The foreignness of his psyche is like a tangible impact – or getting lost in an empty realm. Going into this book is not just reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the fear involved a nightmare during which I was stuck in a box and, when I woke up, I found that I had ripped a part out of the window frame, attempting to escape. That building was falling apart; when storms came the downstairs hall flooded, insect eggs came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and at one time a sizeable vermin climbed the drapes in the bedroom.

After an acquaintance presented me with this author’s book, I had moved out at my family home, but the tale regarding the building perched on the cliffs appeared known to me, homesick as I was. This is a novel about a haunted clamorous, atmospheric home and a female character who consumes chalk from the cliffs. I cherished the story immensely and came back frequently to it, each time discovering {something