Frightening Authors Reveal the Most Frightening Tales They have Actually Read

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by a master of suspense

I discovered this story years ago and it has haunted me since then. The so-called vacationers turn out to be a couple from the city, who occupy an identical isolated rural cabin each year. This time, in place of heading back to the city, they opt to prolong their holiday an extra month – a decision that to unsettle each resident in the nearby town. Each repeats an identical cryptic advice that nobody has remained by the water after Labor Day. Nonetheless, they are determined to remain, and that’s when things start to get increasingly weird. The man who brings fuel refuses to sell for them. No one is willing to supply supplies to the cottage, and as the Allisons endeavor to go to the village, their vehicle refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the energy within the device diminish, and when night comes, “the aged individuals clung to each other within their rental and waited”. What are they expecting? What do the residents know? Every time I revisit Jackson’s disturbing and inspiring narrative, I’m reminded that the finest fright originates in the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this brief tale two people go to a typical beach community where bells ring constantly, a perpetual pealing that is annoying and unexplainable. The initial truly frightening episode takes place after dark, when they opt to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the sea. Sand is present, there’s the smell of rotting fish and brine, surf is audible, but the ocean is a ghost, or a different entity and even more alarming. It’s just profoundly ominous and each occasion I travel to the coast at night I think about this story that ruined the beach in the evening in my view – in a good way.

The recent spouses – she’s very young, he’s not – go back to the inn and find out the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and death-and-the-maiden meets dance of death chaos. It’s a chilling contemplation on desire and deterioration, two bodies maturing in tandem as a couple, the connection and violence and affection within wedlock.

Not only the most terrifying, but perhaps among the finest short stories available, and an individual preference. I encountered it in Spanish, in the debut release of Aickman stories to be published locally a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I read this narrative beside the swimming area overseas in 2020. Although it was sunny I experienced an icy feeling over me. Additionally, I sensed the electricity of fascination. I was working on my third novel, and I had hit a block. I wasn’t sure whether there existed a proper method to write various frightening aspects the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I realized that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a bleak exploration into the thoughts of a criminal, the protagonist, modeled after an infamous individual, the murderer who slaughtered and mutilated multiple victims in a city during a specific period. Infamously, Dahmer was fixated with producing a compliant victim that would remain with him and made many macabre trials to accomplish it.

The deeds the book depicts are horrific, but equally frightening is its mental realism. Quentin P’s dreadful, broken reality is plainly told in spare prose, names redacted. The audience is sunk deep stuck in his mind, forced to observe ideas and deeds that shock. The strangeness of his thinking feels like a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Entering Zombie is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

When I was a child, I sleepwalked and eventually began having night terrors. At one point, the fear involved a dream during which I was stuck within an enclosure and, upon awakening, I found that I had torn off a piece from the window, seeking to leave. That building was falling apart; when storms came the ground floor corridor flooded, fly larvae fell from the ceiling on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in the bedroom.

After an acquaintance gave me the story, I had moved out with my parents, but the tale regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to me, homesick as I felt. It’s a book featuring a possessed clamorous, emotional house and a girl who ingests limestone off the rocks. I cherished the story deeply and returned again and again to its pages, each time discovering {something