Scary Novelists Share the Most Frightening Narratives They have Ever Read
Andrew Michael Hurley
A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson
I read this narrative years ago and it has haunted me from that moment. The named seasonal visitors happen to be the Allisons urban dwellers, who occupy an identical isolated lakeside house every summer. During this visit, instead of heading back home, they decide to lengthen their holiday for a month longer – a decision that to unsettle everyone in the nearby town. Everyone conveys the same veiled caution that nobody has ever stayed at the lake after the end of summer. Regardless, the couple insist to stay, and that is the moment events begin to become stranger. The person who brings the kerosene declines to provide to them. No one is willing to supply groceries to the cottage, and at the time the family endeavor to go to the village, their vehicle fails to start. Bad weather approaches, the energy within the device die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple crowded closely in their summer cottage and expected”. What are the Allisons anticipating? What could the locals be aware of? Each occasion I revisit this author’s unnerving and thought-provoking narrative, I remember that the top terror comes from that which remains hidden.
Mariana Enríquez
An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman
In this concise narrative a pair travel to a common beach community where bells ring constantly, a constant chiming that is irritating and inexplicable. The opening extremely terrifying moment happens during the evening, as they decide to take a walk and they can’t find the ocean. The beach is there, the scent exists of decaying seafood and seawater, surf is audible, but the ocean is a ghost, or something else and worse. It is truly profoundly ominous and every time I travel to a beach at night I recall this narrative that ruined the beach in the evening to my mind – favorably.
The recent spouses – the wife is youthful, he’s not – return to the hotel and find out the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden intersects with dance of death pandemonium. It’s an unnerving reflection on desire and deterioration, two bodies growing old jointly as partners, the connection and brutality and affection in matrimony.
Not just the most frightening, but likely among the finest concise narratives out there, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in Spanish, in the debut release of these tales to appear in this country a decade ago.
A Prominent Novelist
Zombie by an esteemed writer
I delved into this narrative by a pool in France in 2020. Even with the bright weather I felt cold creep within me. I also experienced the excitement of excitement. I was writing my third novel, and I had hit an obstacle. I didn’t know if it was possible an effective approach to write various frightening aspects the book contains. Reading Zombie, I realized that there was a way.
Published in 1995, the book is a grim journey through the mind of a murderer, the protagonist, modeled after an infamous individual, the serial killer who killed and cut apart 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee over a decade. Infamously, Dahmer was obsessed with producing a submissive individual who would stay by his side and carried out several macabre trials to accomplish it.
The actions the book depicts are terrible, but just as scary is its emotional authenticity. The character’s dreadful, broken reality is directly described in spare prose, details omitted. The reader is plunged trapped in his consciousness, compelled to see mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The strangeness of his thinking feels like a tangible impact – or getting lost on a desolate planet. Going into this book feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.
Daisy Johnson
White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi
In my early years, I sleepwalked and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. Once, the terror featured a dream in which I was trapped within an enclosure and, as I roused, I discovered that I had ripped the slat from the window, attempting to escape. That house was decaying; when storms came the entranceway filled with water, fly larvae dropped from above onto the bed, and at one time a big rodent climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.
When a friend handed me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out with my parents, but the tale about the home high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar in my view, nostalgic at that time. This is a book concerning a ghostly clamorous, atmospheric home and a female character who consumes limestone from the cliffs. I loved the book deeply and came back frequently to the story, always finding {something
