Horror Writers Discuss the Most Terrifying Stories They have Ever Encountered

Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I read this tale years ago and it has haunted me since then. The named vacationers happen to be the Allisons urban dwellers, who lease a particular off-grid country cottage annually. During this visit, instead of going back home, they opt to extend their holiday a few more weeks – something that seems to disturb everyone in the adjacent village. Each repeats a similar vague warning that nobody has ever stayed by the water beyond Labor Day. Nonetheless, they insist to not leave, and that’s when events begin to become stranger. The individual who delivers the kerosene declines to provide to them. Nobody will deliver food to their home, and as they try to go to the village, the automobile fails to start. A storm gathers, the power within the device fade, and as darkness falls, “the two old people huddled together inside their cabin and expected”. What are the Allisons expecting? What do the townspeople be aware of? Each occasion I revisit this author’s chilling and influential narrative, I remember that the finest fright comes from what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by a noted author

In this brief tale a couple go to a common seaside town in which chimes sound continuously, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and puzzling. The initial very scary scene happens after dark, when they choose to walk around and they are unable to locate the ocean. Sand is present, there is the odor of decaying seafood and brine, waves crash, but the ocean appears spectral, or another thing and worse. It’s just deeply malevolent and each occasion I go to the coast after dark I recall this story that ruined the sea at night for me – in a good way.

The young couple – she’s very young, the husband is older – head back to their lodging and discover why the bells ring, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and mortality and youth intersects with grim ballet chaos. It’s an unnerving meditation about longing and decline, a pair of individuals maturing in tandem as partners, the bond and violence and tenderness of marriage.

Not merely the most terrifying, but probably one of the best concise narratives available, and a personal favourite. I read it in Spanish, in the debut release of these tales to be released in Argentina several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from an esteemed writer

I delved into this narrative beside the swimming area overseas a few years ago. Despite the sunshine I experienced a chill through me. Additionally, I sensed the thrill of fascination. I was writing my third novel, and I encountered a wall. I was uncertain whether there existed an effective approach to craft certain terrifying elements the book contains. Experiencing this novel, I saw that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a grim journey into the thoughts of a murderer, the main character, modeled after a notorious figure, the serial killer who murdered and dismembered multiple victims in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, Dahmer was consumed with producing a compliant victim who would never leave by his side and carried out several grisly attempts to accomplish it.

The deeds the book depicts are appalling, but just as scary is the emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s dreadful, fragmented world is directly described using minimal words, details omitted. The reader is sunk deep stuck in his mind, forced to see ideas and deeds that shock. The foreignness of his psyche feels like a bodily jolt – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Entering this story is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and subsequently commenced having night terrors. Once, the terror included a vision during which I was stuck inside a container and, upon awakening, I discovered that I had torn off a piece off the window, attempting to escape. That house was crumbling; during heavy rain the downstairs hall filled with water, fly larvae dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a big rodent climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.

When a friend presented me with this author’s book, I was no longer living with my parents, but the tale regarding the building perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable to myself, longing at that time. It is a novel about a haunted loud, sentimental building and a female character who consumes calcium from the shoreline. I adored the book immensely and returned repeatedly to the story, consistently uncovering {something