Horror Authors Discuss the Most Frightening Stories They've Ever Read

A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I discovered this tale years ago and it has stayed with me from that moment. The named “summer people” are a family from the city, who occupy an identical isolated country cottage each year. On this occasion, rather than going back to urban life, they opt to extend their holiday a few more weeks – a decision that to disturb all the locals in the surrounding community. Each repeats the same veiled caution that nobody has lingered at the lake past Labor Day. Regardless, they insist to remain, and that is the moment things start to become stranger. The person who brings the kerosene won’t sell to the couple. Not a single person agrees to bring food to the cabin, and when the Allisons try to go to the village, the automobile refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the batteries within the device fade, and as darkness falls, “the two old people huddled together in their summer cottage and expected”. What are they waiting for? What do the residents understand? Each occasion I read this author’s disturbing and influential tale, I’m reminded that the top terror originates in that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by a noted author

In this concise narrative a couple journey to a typical beach community where bells ring continuously, an incessant ringing that is irritating and unexplainable. The opening very scary moment happens during the evening, when they choose to walk around and they can’t find the ocean. The beach is there, there’s the smell of rotting fish and seawater, surf is audible, but the water is a ghost, or a different entity and more dreadful. It’s just profoundly ominous and whenever I visit to the coast in the evening I recall this story which spoiled the ocean after dark to my mind – positively.

The recent spouses – she’s very young, the husband is older – return to the inn and find out why the bells ring, during a prolonged scene of confinement, macabre revelry and demise and innocence meets grim ballet bedlam. It’s an unnerving contemplation about longing and deterioration, a pair of individuals aging together as partners, the bond and aggression and gentleness within wedlock.

Not only the scariest, but perhaps among the finest short stories in existence, and a personal favourite. I read it en español, in the first edition of Aickman stories to be released locally several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into Zombie by a pool in France a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I experienced a chill through me. Additionally, I sensed the electricity of excitement. I was working on my third novel, and I faced a wall. I didn’t know whether there existed an effective approach to compose various frightening aspects the story includes. Reading Zombie, I understood that there was a way.

Published in 1995, the novel is a grim journey within the psyche of a young serial killer, Quentin P, inspired by a notorious figure, the murderer who slaughtered and mutilated numerous individuals in a city between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, the killer was obsessed with creating a zombie sex slave who would stay him and carried out several grisly attempts to accomplish it.

The acts the book depicts are appalling, but just as scary is its psychological persuasiveness. The protagonist’s dreadful, shattered existence is plainly told with concise language, names redacted. You is immersed trapped in his consciousness, compelled to witness thoughts and actions that appal. The alien nature of his mind is like a bodily jolt – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Starting Zombie feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from a gifted writer

In my early years, I walked in my sleep and subsequently commenced suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the terror included a dream where I was trapped in a box and, as I roused, I found that I had ripped the slat off the window, seeking to leave. That home was crumbling; when it rained heavily the entranceway became inundated, insect eggs came down from the roof into the bedroom, and on one occasion a big rodent ascended the window coverings in that space.

Once a companion gave me this author’s book, I had moved out at my family home, but the narrative about the home high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable in my view, nostalgic as I felt. This is a story about a haunted loud, sentimental building and a young woman who consumes chalk from the cliffs. I loved the story so much and came back frequently to its pages, always finding {something