Frightening Novelists Reveal the Most Terrifying Tales They've Actually Encountered

A Renowned Horror Author

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I discovered this narrative some time back and it has haunted me from that moment. The named seasonal visitors happen to be the Allisons urban dwellers, who occupy the same isolated country cottage each year. On this occasion, instead of heading back home, they choose to extend their vacation for a month longer – an action that appears to alarm everyone in the nearby town. Each repeats an identical cryptic advice that no one has ever stayed at the lake past the holiday. Nonetheless, they are resolved to stay, and that is the moment things start to grow more bizarre. The individual who delivers fuel declines to provide to the couple. No one will deliver groceries to the cottage, and when they endeavor to go to the village, the automobile won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the power within the device diminish, and when night comes, “the two old people crowded closely inside their cabin and expected”. What might be this couple anticipating? What could the locals be aware of? Whenever I revisit Jackson’s disturbing and thought-provoking tale, I recall that the best horror stems from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a pair journey to a typical coastal village in which chimes sound constantly, a constant chiming that is bothersome and puzzling. The opening extremely terrifying episode takes place at night, at the time they decide to walk around and they can’t find the sea. The beach is there, there is the odor of rotting fish and brine, surf is audible, but the water seems phantom, or another thing and even more alarming. It’s just insanely sinister and whenever I visit to the coast after dark I remember this narrative which spoiled the sea at night to my mind – favorably.

The recent spouses – the wife is youthful, the husband is older – head back to the hotel and find out why the bells ring, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and mortality and youth encounters grim ballet chaos. It’s a chilling contemplation on desire and deterioration, a pair of individuals aging together as a couple, the connection and aggression and affection in matrimony.

Not only the most terrifying, but likely a top example of short stories out there, and a beloved choice. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of Aickman stories to be released in Argentina a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this book beside the swimming area in France a few years ago. Although it was sunny I sensed a chill over me. I also experienced the excitement of fascination. I was writing my latest book, and I encountered an obstacle. I wasn’t sure if it was possible any good way to craft certain terrifying elements the book contains. Reading Zombie, I realized that it was possible.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a bleak exploration within the psyche of a young serial killer, Quentin P, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who slaughtered and cut apart 17 young men and boys in a city between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, Dahmer was consumed with creating a compliant victim who would never leave with him and attempted numerous macabre trials to do so.

The acts the novel describes are terrible, but equally frightening is its own psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s dreadful, fragmented world is simply narrated in spare prose, identities hidden. You is plunged trapped in his consciousness, obliged to observe mental processes and behaviors that shock. The strangeness of his thinking feels like a tangible impact – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Going into this book is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from a gifted writer

In my early years, I walked in my sleep and eventually began experiencing nightmares. On one occasion, the fear featured a vision where I was confined in a box and, as I roused, I discovered that I had ripped a part out of the window frame, trying to get out. That building was falling apart; when storms came the downstairs hall became inundated, maggots dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and once a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in my sister’s room.

Once a companion handed me the story, I was no longer living with my parents, but the tale of the house perched on the cliffs felt familiar to myself, homesick at that time. This is a book about a haunted noisy, sentimental building and a young woman who consumes limestone from the shoreline. I cherished the story immensely and came back again and again to the story, each time discovering {something