Scary Writers Share the Most Terrifying Narratives They have Actually Read
A Renowned Horror Author
A Chilling Tale by a master of suspense
I encountered this narrative years ago and it has stayed with me from that moment. The named seasonal visitors happen to be a family urban dwellers, who rent the same off-grid lakeside house annually. During this visit, rather than returning to the city, they choose to prolong their stay for a month longer – a decision that to alarm each resident in the nearby town. Each repeats the same veiled caution that nobody has remained in the area past the end of summer. Regardless, the couple insist to not leave, and that’s when events begin to become stranger. The person who supplies the kerosene refuses to sell for them. Nobody will deliver supplies to the cabin, and as they try to drive into town, the car refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the energy in the radio fade, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple crowded closely in their summer cottage and waited”. What are this couple anticipating? What do the residents understand? Every time I read Jackson’s chilling and influential tale, I’m reminded that the finest fright stems from that which remains hidden.
An Acclaimed Writer
An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman
In this concise narrative a pair go to a typical beach community in which chimes sound continuously, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and unexplainable. The opening very scary scene occurs after dark, at the time they decide to take a walk and they are unable to locate the ocean. The beach is there, there is the odor of rotting fish and brine, surf is audible, but the water appears spectral, or a different entity and even more alarming. It’s just deeply malevolent and every time I travel to the shore in the evening I recall this tale which spoiled the ocean after dark to my mind – positively.
The recent spouses – she’s very young, the man is mature – head back to the hotel and find out the cause of the ringing, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth meets danse macabre bedlam. It is a disturbing meditation about longing and deterioration, two bodies aging together as partners, the bond and aggression and gentleness in matrimony.
Not just the most frightening, but perhaps a top example of brief tales available, and an individual preference. I read it in Spanish, in the debut release of this author’s works to be published in this country several years back.
Catriona Ward
A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates
I perused this narrative by a pool in the French countryside recently. Although it was sunny I sensed a chill within me. Additionally, I sensed the electricity of fascination. I was working on my latest book, and I had hit a block. I didn’t know if there was any good way to craft some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Going through this book, I understood that there was a way.
Published in 1995, the novel is a dark flight into the thoughts of a criminal, Quentin P, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who murdered and mutilated multiple victims in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, this person was fixated with making a compliant victim that would remain by his side and made many grisly attempts to accomplish it.
The actions the novel describes are horrific, but similarly terrifying is the psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s awful, fragmented world is plainly told in spare prose, names redacted. The reader is plunged caught in his thoughts, obliged to see thoughts and actions that shock. The strangeness of his thinking resembles a tangible impact – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Starting Zombie is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.
Daisy Johnson
White Is for Witching by a gifted writer
When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and subsequently commenced having night terrors. At one point, the horror involved a nightmare during which I was trapped inside a container and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had torn off a piece off the window, attempting to escape. That building was falling apart; during heavy rain the ground floor corridor became inundated, fly larvae came down from the roof into the bedroom, and at one time a big rodent ascended the window coverings in my sister’s room.
After an acquaintance presented me with this author’s book, I had moved out at my family home, but the narrative about the home high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to myself, homesick at that time. This is a novel featuring a possessed clamorous, sentimental building and a female character who consumes limestone from the shoreline. I adored the story so much and returned repeatedly to it, consistently uncovering {something
