Frightening Authors Discuss the Most Terrifying Narratives They have Ever Experienced

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by a master of suspense

I discovered this tale years ago and it has lingered with me from that moment. The so-called seasonal visitors are a couple urban dwellers, who rent a particular isolated rural cabin each year. On this occasion, instead of going back to urban life, they opt to prolong their holiday for a month longer – an action that appears to unsettle everyone in the surrounding community. All pass on an identical cryptic advice that no one has ever stayed in the area beyond the end of summer. Regardless, the couple are resolved to stay, and at that point things start to grow more bizarre. The person who brings fuel won’t sell to the couple. Nobody is willing to supply groceries to the cottage, and as the Allisons try to travel to the community, their vehicle fails to start. A tempest builds, the power within the device diminish, and when night comes, “the aged individuals crowded closely inside their cabin and anticipated”. What are this couple waiting for? What could the residents know? Every time I read Jackson’s disturbing and influential story, I remember that the best horror comes from what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes by a noted author

In this short story a pair travel to a typical beach community where bells ring the whole time, an incessant ringing that is irritating and unexplainable. The opening extremely terrifying scene occurs during the evening, when they decide to take a walk and they are unable to locate the water. Sand is present, there’s the smell of rotting fish and salt, there are waves, but the ocean seems phantom, or something else and more dreadful. It is truly insanely sinister and every time I visit to a beach at night I recall this tale which spoiled the sea at night to my mind – in a good way.

The recent spouses – she’s very young, he’s not – return to the hotel and discover the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth meets dance of death pandemonium. It’s a chilling contemplation regarding craving and decline, a pair of individuals aging together as partners, the attachment and violence and affection of marriage.

Not merely the scariest, but probably among the finest brief tales out there, and a beloved choice. I read it in Spanish, in the first edition of these tales to be published locally in 2011.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this narrative beside the swimming area overseas recently. Although it was sunny I felt an icy feeling through me. Additionally, I sensed the thrill of anticipation. I was composing my latest book, and I had hit a block. I didn’t know whether there existed a proper method to craft various frightening aspects the book contains. Going through this book, I saw that it could be done.

Published in 1995, the book is a bleak exploration through the mind of a criminal, the protagonist, based on a notorious figure, the criminal who slaughtered and mutilated 17 young men and boys in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, the killer was consumed with making a zombie sex slave that would remain him and carried out several grisly attempts to do so.

The acts the book depicts are horrific, but equally frightening is its own mental realism. The protagonist’s terrible, shattered existence is directly described with concise language, details omitted. The audience is sunk deep stuck in his mind, obliged to witness thoughts and actions that horrify. The alien nature of his thinking is like a bodily jolt – or getting lost on a desolate planet. Entering Zombie is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I was a somnambulist and later started experiencing nightmares. On one occasion, the horror involved a dream where I was stuck inside a container and, upon awakening, I found that I had torn off the slat out of the window frame, attempting to escape. That house was crumbling; during heavy rain the entranceway flooded, insect eggs dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a big rodent climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.

Once a companion handed me this author’s book, I was no longer living at my family home, but the tale regarding the building perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable to myself, longing as I felt. It’s a story about a haunted clamorous, sentimental building and a female character who ingests limestone from the cliffs. I cherished the novel deeply and came back repeatedly to it, consistently uncovering {something