Frightening Authors Share the Most Terrifying Tales They have Actually Experienced

Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from a master of suspense

I discovered this story some time back and it has haunted me since then. The so-called seasonal visitors happen to be a couple urban dwellers, who occupy a particular off-grid country cottage each year. On this occasion, instead of heading back to the city, they choose to extend their vacation a few more weeks – a decision that to unsettle everyone in the nearby town. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that no one has lingered in the area beyond the end of summer. Nonetheless, the couple are resolved to not leave, and that is the moment things start to get increasingly weird. The man who supplies oil won’t sell to them. No one will deliver groceries to the cottage, and at the time the family try to drive into town, the automobile fails to start. A storm gathers, the energy in the radio diminish, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple crowded closely inside their cabin and anticipated”. What might be the Allisons waiting for? What could the locals understand? Every time I revisit Jackson’s unnerving and inspiring tale, I recall that the finest fright originates in the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a pair travel to an ordinary beach community in which chimes sound the whole time, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and inexplicable. The initial extremely terrifying episode takes place during the evening, at the time they choose to take a walk and they are unable to locate the sea. The beach is there, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and seawater, there are waves, but the ocean seems phantom, or a different entity and more dreadful. It’s just profoundly ominous and whenever I travel to the coast after dark I recall this narrative that destroyed the ocean after dark for me – positively.

The newlyweds – the wife is youthful, the husband is older – go back to the hotel and discover the cause of the ringing, during a prolonged scene of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden intersects with danse macabre bedlam. It’s an unnerving meditation about longing and decay, two bodies maturing in tandem as partners, the attachment and aggression and affection of marriage.

Not only the scariest, but likely a top example of concise narratives in existence, and a beloved choice. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to be released in this country several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I read this narrative by a pool in the French countryside recently. Despite the sunshine I felt cold creep within me. I also experienced the excitement of fascination. I was working on a new project, and I faced a wall. I didn’t know whether there existed a proper method to compose some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Experiencing this novel, I realized that it was possible.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a dark flight through the mind of a criminal, the protagonist, inspired by a notorious figure, the criminal who slaughtered and dismembered numerous individuals in a city during a specific period. As is well-known, Dahmer was fixated with producing a compliant victim that would remain with him and made many grisly attempts to achieve this.

The actions the book depicts are terrible, but similarly terrifying is its own mental realism. Quentin P’s dreadful, fragmented world is directly described in spare prose, names redacted. You is immersed caught in his thoughts, forced to observe mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The foreignness of his mind is like a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated on a desolate planet. Going into Zombie is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from a gifted writer

When I was a child, I sleepwalked and eventually began having night terrors. Once, the horror included a dream in which I was trapped within an enclosure and, upon awakening, I realized that I had torn off a piece off the window, trying to get out. That house was falling apart; during heavy rain the downstairs hall flooded, maggots fell from the ceiling on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a large rat scaled the curtains in my sister’s room.

When a friend handed me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere at my family home, but the narrative of the house high on the Dover cliffs appeared known to me, nostalgic as I felt. It is a book about a haunted noisy, sentimental building and a female character who eats limestone from the cliffs. I cherished the novel immensely and went back frequently to it, consistently uncovering {something