Horror Writers Reveal the Most Terrifying Tales They have Ever Read

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I encountered this story long ago and it has lingered with me ever since. The named vacationers turn out to be a couple from New York, who occupy the same remote country cottage each year. This time, in place of going back to urban life, they opt to lengthen their holiday a few more weeks – a decision that to disturb everyone in the adjacent village. Each repeats an identical cryptic advice that no one has ever stayed at the lake past Labor Day. Nonetheless, the couple are determined to remain, and that is the moment things start to become stranger. The individual who brings the kerosene won’t sell to the couple. Not a single person is willing to supply supplies to the cabin, and at the time the Allisons try to go to the village, their vehicle refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the power of their radio fade, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people crowded closely in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What are the Allisons waiting for? What might the locals know? Whenever I read Jackson’s chilling and inspiring tale, I recall that the top terror originates in the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a couple journey to a typical beach community in which chimes sound the whole time, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and puzzling. The opening extremely terrifying episode occurs after dark, when they decide to walk around and they fail to see the water. There’s sand, there is the odor of rotting fish and brine, waves crash, but the water seems phantom, or a different entity and more dreadful. It’s just deeply malevolent and whenever I go to the coast at night I think about this tale which spoiled the ocean after dark in my view – positively.

The recent spouses – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – head back to the inn and learn why the bells ring, through an extended episode of confinement, gruesome festivities and death-and-the-maiden encounters danse macabre pandemonium. It’s a chilling meditation about longing and decline, a pair of individuals maturing in tandem as partners, the connection and violence and gentleness of marriage.

Not only the scariest, but likely among the finest brief tales out there, and a personal favourite. I read it en español, in the debut release of these tales to be published in this country a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I delved into this book near the water overseas a few years ago. Although it was sunny I experienced a chill through me. I also experienced the excitement of excitement. I was composing my latest book, and I encountered a wall. I wasn’t sure whether there existed a proper method to craft certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Going through this book, I realized that there was a way.

Published in 1995, the novel is a grim journey within the psyche of a murderer, Quentin P, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who murdered and cut apart multiple victims in Milwaukee over a decade. Infamously, Dahmer was fixated with making a submissive individual who would stay him and attempted numerous grisly attempts to accomplish it.

The acts the book depicts are terrible, but equally frightening is its own psychological persuasiveness. The protagonist’s awful, fragmented world is simply narrated in spare prose, names redacted. You is sunk deep stuck in his mind, forced to witness mental processes and behaviors that shock. The foreignness of his mind feels like a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated on a desolate planet. Starting Zombie is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I sleepwalked and eventually began having night terrors. At one point, the terror included a nightmare in which I was stuck in a box and, as I roused, I realized that I had torn off the slat off the window, attempting to escape. That building was crumbling; during heavy rain the ground floor corridor flooded, insect eggs dropped from above into the bedroom, and at one time a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in my sister’s room.

Once a companion handed me this author’s book, I had moved out at my family home, but the story of the house perched on the cliffs felt familiar to me, nostalgic as I was. It is a novel featuring a possessed noisy, atmospheric home and a female character who eats calcium from the shoreline. I adored the story so much and went back repeatedly to the story, consistently uncovering {something