Frightening Writers Reveal the Scariest Stories They have Ever Read
A Renowned Horror Author
The Summer People by Shirley Jackson
I discovered this narrative years ago and it has stayed with me ever since. The so-called “summer people” happen to be the Allisons urban dwellers, who lease an identical isolated country cottage annually. During this visit, rather than going back home, they choose to prolong their stay for a month longer – a decision that to unsettle each resident in the surrounding community. Each repeats an identical cryptic advice that no one has lingered in the area beyond the holiday. Regardless, they are determined to not leave, and at that point events begin to grow more bizarre. The man who supplies oil won’t sell for them. Not a single person is willing to supply groceries to the cabin, and when the family attempt to travel to the community, their vehicle refuses to operate. A storm gathers, the batteries of their radio die, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple huddled together inside their cabin and waited”. What are this couple waiting for? What do the townspeople know? Every time I revisit Jackson’s chilling and influential story, I remember that the top terror stems from that which remains hidden.
Mariana Enríquez
An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman
In this short story a pair go to a common coastal village where bells ring constantly, a perpetual pealing that is annoying and puzzling. The initial truly frightening scene happens at night, at the time they decide to walk around and they can’t find the sea. Sand is present, there is the odor of rotting fish and salt, surf is audible, but the sea appears spectral, or something else and worse. It is simply profoundly ominous and every time I visit to a beach after dark I recall this narrative that ruined the beach in the evening for me – positively.
The recent spouses – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – return to the inn and find out why the bells ring, in a long sequence of confinement, macabre revelry and demise and innocence meets grim ballet pandemonium. It’s a chilling reflection about longing and decay, two people growing old jointly as spouses, the connection and brutality and gentleness of marriage.
Not merely the most frightening, but likely among the finest concise narratives out there, and a beloved choice. I encountered it en español, in the debut release of Aickman stories to appear in this country in 2011.
A Prominent Novelist
A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates
I read this book near the water in France a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I felt an icy feeling over me. Additionally, I sensed the excitement of excitement. I was composing my third novel, and I faced an obstacle. I didn’t know whether there existed any good way to write some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I understood that there was a way.
Released decades ago, the story is a dark flight through the mind of a murderer, the protagonist, based on an infamous individual, the criminal who murdered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in a city between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, the killer was consumed with making a submissive individual who would stay with him and made many horrific efforts to achieve this.
The acts the book depicts are horrific, but equally frightening is its own mental realism. Quentin P’s terrible, fragmented world is simply narrated in spare prose, names redacted. The audience is immersed trapped in his consciousness, forced to observe mental processes and behaviors that shock. The alien nature of his thinking feels like a tangible impact – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Entering Zombie feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are consumed entirely.
Daisy Johnson
White Is for Witching from a gifted writer
When I was a child, I sleepwalked and later started having night terrors. On one occasion, the fear involved a dream where I was stuck inside a container and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had ripped a piece out of the window frame, attempting to escape. That house was crumbling; when storms came the ground floor corridor flooded, insect eggs dropped from above into the bedroom, and on one occasion a big rodent climbed the drapes in that space.
After an acquaintance handed me the story, I was no longer living in my childhood residence, but the narrative of the house high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to me, homesick as I felt. This is a novel about a haunted clamorous, atmospheric home and a young woman who eats chalk from the cliffs. I cherished the book immensely and went back repeatedly to the story, consistently uncovering {something
