Scary Writers Discuss the Scariest Stories They've Ever Encountered

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I read this tale long ago and it has stayed with me from that moment. The titular seasonal visitors turn out to be a couple urban dwellers, who lease the same off-grid rural cabin each year. This time, rather than heading back to urban life, they opt to extend their holiday an extra month – something that seems to alarm all the locals in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that nobody has lingered in the area past Labor Day. Nonetheless, they are resolved to stay, and that’s when things start to become stranger. The individual who supplies oil won’t sell for them. No one is willing to supply supplies to the cabin, and when the family endeavor to travel to the community, their vehicle refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the batteries of their radio die, and when night comes, “the two old people crowded closely in their summer cottage and expected”. What are they anticipating? What do the townspeople understand? Whenever I read the writer’s disturbing and inspiring story, I recall that the best horror comes from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by a noted author

In this short story two people go to a typical seaside town where bells ring constantly, a constant chiming that is annoying and inexplicable. The first very scary scene happens after dark, when they opt to walk around and they are unable to locate the water. There’s sand, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and salt, waves crash, but the ocean is a ghost, or something else and more dreadful. It is simply profoundly ominous and every time I visit to a beach at night I think about this narrative that ruined the beach in the evening for me – favorably.

The newlyweds – she’s very young, the man is mature – head back to the inn and discover the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, necro-orgy and mortality and youth encounters danse macabre bedlam. It’s an unnerving meditation on desire and decline, two bodies maturing in tandem as spouses, the connection and aggression and tenderness within wedlock.

Not merely the most frightening, but perhaps a top example of brief tales out there, and a beloved choice. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of this author’s works to be released locally a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates

I read this book beside the swimming area in France a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I felt an icy feeling over me. Additionally, I sensed the electricity of fascination. I was composing my latest book, and I faced an obstacle. I was uncertain if there was an effective approach to craft various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I understood that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a dark flight through the mind of a criminal, Quentin P, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who slaughtered and mutilated numerous individuals in the Midwest over a decade. Notoriously, the killer was consumed with making a submissive individual that would remain by his side and carried out several macabre trials to achieve this.

The actions the novel describes are appalling, but equally frightening is the mental realism. Quentin P’s dreadful, shattered existence is plainly told with concise language, names redacted. The reader is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, obliged to witness ideas and deeds that shock. The strangeness of his psyche is like a tangible impact – or finding oneself isolated on a desolate planet. Starting Zombie feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I walked in my sleep and subsequently commenced having night terrors. At one point, the fear featured a dream where I was trapped within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I found that I had removed a piece out of the window frame, trying to get out. That building was crumbling; when storms came the downstairs hall flooded, fly larvae came down from the roof into the bedroom, and once a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in my sister’s room.

After an acquaintance presented me with the story, I was no longer living at my family home, but the narrative regarding the building located on the coastline appeared known to me, longing at that time. This is a story concerning a ghostly clamorous, atmospheric home and a girl who consumes calcium off the rocks. I loved the book deeply and went back frequently to its pages, each time discovering {something