Scary Authors Discuss the Scariest Stories They have Ever Read

Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I encountered this narrative long ago and it has stayed with me since then. The named vacationers turn out to be the Allisons from New York, who lease an identical off-grid rural cabin each year. On this occasion, instead of going back home, they opt to prolong their stay a few more weeks – an action that appears to alarm all the locals in the surrounding community. Each repeats the same veiled caution that nobody has lingered in the area past the holiday. Even so, the Allisons are determined to not leave, and that’s when events begin to grow more bizarre. The person who supplies fuel refuses to sell for them. No one is willing to supply groceries to their home, and when they attempt to travel to the community, the car refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the energy in the radio die, and as darkness falls, “the two old people huddled together inside their cabin and waited”. What are this couple anticipating? What do the locals understand? Every time I revisit this author’s chilling and inspiring story, I’m reminded that the best horror comes from what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a couple go to an ordinary beach community in which chimes sound continuously, a constant chiming that is bothersome and unexplainable. The first truly frightening moment happens during the evening, when they choose to walk around and they fail to see the sea. There’s sand, the scent exists of rotting fish and seawater, there are waves, but the water appears spectral, or a different entity and worse. It’s just deeply malevolent and every time I visit to the shore at night I recall this narrative that destroyed the ocean after dark in my view – in a good way.

The young couple – the woman is adolescent, he’s not – return to the hotel and learn the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden intersects with grim ballet pandemonium. It’s an unnerving contemplation about longing and decay, two people aging together as partners, the bond and violence and affection within wedlock.

Not just the most terrifying, but probably among the finest concise narratives available, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of Aickman stories to appear in this country several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this book beside the swimming area in France in 2020. Despite the sunshine I experienced a chill over me. I also experienced the electricity of excitement. I was writing a new project, and I faced a wall. I wasn’t sure if there was an effective approach to compose various frightening aspects the story includes. Going through this book, I realized that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a grim journey through the mind of a murderer, Quentin P, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who murdered and mutilated multiple victims in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, this person was obsessed with creating a zombie sex slave who would stay with him and made many grisly attempts to accomplish it.

The actions the book depicts are terrible, but just as scary is the mental realism. The protagonist’s dreadful, broken reality is directly described in spare prose, details omitted. You is immersed stuck in his mind, forced to witness mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The alien nature of his thinking is like a bodily jolt – or getting lost in an empty realm. Starting this book is less like reading than a full body experience. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel by a gifted writer

When I was a child, I sleepwalked and later started having night terrors. On one occasion, the horror involved a vision in which I was trapped inside a container and, as I roused, I realized that I had torn off the slat out of the window frame, attempting to escape. That building was falling apart; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall became inundated, insect eggs came down from the roof onto the bed, and on one occasion a big rodent climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.

Once a companion gave me this author’s book, I had moved out at my family home, but the narrative about the home high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable in my view, homesick as I felt. It is a story featuring a possessed clamorous, sentimental building and a young woman who consumes limestone off the rocks. I adored the novel so much and returned again and again to it, consistently uncovering {something