Scary Writers Discuss the Scariest Tales They have Ever Read

A Renowned Horror Author

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I read this story years ago and it has haunted me ever since. The so-called vacationers turn out to be a couple urban dwellers, who lease the same off-grid lakeside house annually. This time, in place of going back to urban life, they decide to extend their holiday an extra month – something that seems to unsettle each resident in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that no one has remained in the area past the end of summer. Regardless, the couple are resolved to not leave, and at that point things start to become stranger. The man who supplies oil won’t sell to the couple. Nobody agrees to bring groceries to their home, and as the Allisons try to go to the village, the automobile won’t start. A tempest builds, the power within the device die, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals crowded closely in their summer cottage and waited”. What are they waiting for? What could the residents know? Every time I peruse Jackson’s disturbing and influential tale, I remember that the top terror stems from that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes from a noted author

In this concise narrative a couple go to a typical seaside town in which chimes sound continuously, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and unexplainable. The opening extremely terrifying moment occurs during the evening, as they decide to walk around and they can’t find the sea. The beach is there, the scent exists of rotting fish and brine, surf is audible, but the ocean is a ghost, or another thing and more dreadful. It is simply profoundly ominous and each occasion I go to a beach after dark I recall this tale that ruined the ocean after dark to my mind – in a good way.

The recent spouses – she’s very young, he’s not – return to the hotel and learn the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of confinement, necro-orgy and mortality and youth encounters grim ballet pandemonium. It’s an unnerving meditation about longing and deterioration, two people maturing in tandem as partners, the bond and violence and affection of marriage.

Not merely the scariest, but probably a top example of concise narratives in existence, and a personal favourite. I read it en español, in the first edition of Aickman stories to appear locally in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer

I read this narrative beside the swimming area in France a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I felt a chill within me. Additionally, I sensed the excitement of anticipation. I was working on my latest book, and I had hit an obstacle. I didn’t know whether there existed an effective approach to compose various frightening aspects the book contains. Experiencing this novel, I saw that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a dark flight within the psyche of a young serial killer, the protagonist, modeled after a notorious figure, the criminal who killed and cut apart multiple victims in the Midwest over a decade. Notoriously, this person was fixated with making a zombie sex slave that would remain with him and made many macabre trials to do so.

The actions the novel describes are appalling, but similarly terrifying is the mental realism. The protagonist’s awful, fragmented world is plainly told in spare prose, names redacted. You is plunged stuck in his mind, obliged to see mental processes and behaviors that appal. The strangeness of his thinking is like a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Going into Zombie feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I was a somnambulist and later started having night terrors. Once, the fear included a dream where I was trapped in a box and, as I roused, I discovered that I had removed the slat out of the window frame, attempting to escape. That house was crumbling; when storms came the entranceway filled with water, fly larvae came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and at one time a big rodent climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.

When a friend presented me with this author’s book, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the story of the house high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to myself, homesick at that time. It is a story featuring a possessed clamorous, sentimental building and a young woman who consumes limestone from the shoreline. I loved the book deeply and went back repeatedly to its pages, each time discovering {something