Frightening Writers Discuss the Most Terrifying Tales They've Ever Experienced

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I read this story some time back and it has haunted me from that moment. The so-called seasonal visitors are a couple urban dwellers, who rent the same isolated country cottage each year. On this occasion, rather than returning to the city, they choose to lengthen their stay for a month longer – something that seems to disturb everyone in the surrounding community. Everyone conveys the same veiled caution that nobody has remained by the water beyond the end of summer. Nonetheless, the Allisons are resolved to remain, and at that point events begin to grow more bizarre. The man who brings oil won’t sell for them. Not a single person agrees to bring food to their home, and at the time the Allisons endeavor to go to the village, their vehicle refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the energy within the device die, and when night comes, “the elderly couple crowded closely in their summer cottage and waited”. What are they waiting for? What might the locals know? Every time I read this author’s disturbing and thought-provoking tale, I’m reminded that the finest fright stems from that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes by a noted author

In this brief tale a couple journey to a typical seaside town where church bells toll the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is annoying and unexplainable. The initial extremely terrifying scene takes place after dark, at the time they choose to walk around and they are unable to locate the ocean. Sand is present, there is the odor of decaying seafood and salt, there are waves, but the water is a ghost, or another thing and more dreadful. It’s just insanely sinister and whenever I go to the shore in the evening I remember this narrative that destroyed the sea at night to my mind – favorably.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, the husband is older – return to the inn and learn the reason for the chiming, during a prolonged scene of enclosed spaces, necro-orgy and mortality and youth encounters danse macabre pandemonium. It’s an unnerving meditation on desire and decline, a pair of individuals maturing in tandem as spouses, the bond and violence and tenderness within wedlock.

Not only the scariest, but perhaps one of the best brief tales out there, and a beloved choice. I experienced it in Spanish, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to be released in Argentina a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I perused this narrative beside the swimming area in France a few years ago. Despite the sunshine I experienced cold creep over me. Additionally, I sensed the electricity of excitement. I was working on my latest book, and I encountered a block. I wasn’t sure if it was possible an effective approach to craft various frightening aspects the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I saw that it could be done.

Published in 1995, the book is a grim journey into the thoughts of a murderer, Quentin P, modeled after an infamous individual, the murderer who slaughtered and mutilated multiple victims in a city during a specific period. Infamously, Dahmer was obsessed with making a submissive individual who would never leave with him and carried out several horrific efforts to do so.

The acts the novel describes are appalling, but equally frightening is its own mental realism. The protagonist’s terrible, broken reality is simply narrated using minimal words, identities hidden. The audience is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, obliged to witness mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The alien nature of his mind resembles a tangible impact – or getting lost in an empty realm. Starting this book is less like reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I walked in my sleep and eventually began having night terrors. At one point, the fear featured a nightmare during which I was stuck in a box and, when I woke up, I found that I had ripped a part from the window, trying to get out. That home was crumbling; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall flooded, fly larvae dropped from above onto the bed, and on one occasion a big rodent climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.

After an acquaintance gave me this author’s book, I was residing elsewhere at my family home, but the story of the house located on the coastline felt familiar to me, longing at that time. It is a book about a haunted loud, sentimental building and a girl who eats limestone off the rocks. I loved the novel deeply and came back frequently to the story, each time discovering {something