Frightening Authors Reveal the Most Frightening Stories They have Actually Experienced
A Renowned Horror Author
The Summer People by a master of suspense
I encountered this tale long ago and it has lingered with me ever since. The titular “summer people” are a family from New York, who occupy the same off-grid country cottage each year. This time, rather than heading back to urban life, they opt to prolong their vacation a few more weeks – something that seems to alarm all the locals in the nearby town. All pass on an identical cryptic advice that not a soul has ever stayed in the area beyond the holiday. Regardless, the couple are resolved to stay, and at that point situations commence to grow more bizarre. The person who delivers the kerosene refuses to sell to the couple. Not a single person will deliver supplies to their home, and as the family try to travel to the community, the car refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the power of their radio diminish, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals clung to each other within their rental and anticipated”. What are this couple anticipating? What might the locals know? Each occasion I peruse the writer’s chilling and inspiring tale, I recall that the finest fright comes from the unspoken.
Mariana Enríquez
An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman
In this concise narrative two people journey to a common seaside town where church bells toll the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is annoying and puzzling. The first truly frightening scene happens after dark, at the time they choose to walk around and they are unable to locate the water. There’s sand, there is the odor of rotting fish and brine, there are waves, but the ocean is a ghost, or a different entity and more dreadful. It’s just profoundly ominous and whenever I travel to the shore at night I recall this narrative that ruined the beach in the evening to my mind – positively.
The newlyweds – she’s very young, he’s not – go back to the hotel and discover why the bells ring, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, necro-orgy and demise and innocence encounters danse macabre bedlam. It is a disturbing reflection about longing and deterioration, two people aging together as spouses, the bond and violence and affection within wedlock.
Not merely the scariest, but likely among the finest short stories in existence, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in Spanish, in the debut release of these tales to appear in this country a decade ago.
A Prominent Novelist
A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates
I delved into this book by a pool in France in 2020. Despite the sunshine I sensed a chill over me. I also felt the excitement of excitement. I was writing my latest book, and I encountered a block. I wasn’t sure if it was possible an effective approach to compose some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I understood that it could be done.
Released decades ago, the book is a dark flight through the mind of a young serial killer, the protagonist, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who slaughtered and cut apart 17 young men and boys in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, Dahmer was consumed with producing a zombie sex slave who would stay with him and attempted numerous horrific efforts to achieve this.
The deeds the book depicts are horrific, but equally frightening is its psychological persuasiveness. The protagonist’s terrible, fragmented world is directly described using minimal words, details omitted. You is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, forced to witness mental processes and behaviors that appal. The foreignness of his psyche feels like a tangible impact – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Starting this story is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.
Daisy Johnson
White Is for Witching from a gifted writer
When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and subsequently commenced experiencing nightmares. On one occasion, the terror involved a vision during which I was trapped within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had torn off a part from the window, attempting to escape. That house was falling apart; when storms came the downstairs hall became inundated, insect eggs fell from the ceiling on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a large rat climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.
Once a companion handed me this author’s book, I was residing elsewhere in my childhood residence, but the narrative of the house high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to myself, longing as I felt. It’s a story concerning a ghostly loud, sentimental building and a girl who eats limestone off the rocks. I adored the book immensely and went back frequently to it, always finding {something
