Frightening Writers Reveal the Most Frightening Tales They've Actually Read

A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People from a master of suspense

I read this tale some time back and it has haunted me from that moment. The titular “summer people” are a family from the city, who rent an identical remote rural cabin annually. This time, instead of going back home, they choose to prolong their stay an extra month – something that seems to disturb everyone in the surrounding community. All pass on the same veiled caution that not a soul has ever stayed by the water after Labor Day. Regardless, the Allisons are resolved to stay, and at that point things start to get increasingly weird. The individual who supplies oil refuses to sell to the couple. Nobody is willing to supply groceries to the cottage, and as the family try to go to the village, the car refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the energy of their radio die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple clung to each other within their rental and anticipated”. What might be they anticipating? What do the townspeople be aware of? Whenever I read Jackson’s unnerving and thought-provoking story, I recall that the best horror stems from that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a couple go to a typical beach community in which chimes sound constantly, a perpetual pealing that is irritating and unexplainable. The first extremely terrifying scene occurs after dark, when they opt to go for a stroll and they fail to see the water. Sand is present, there is the odor of decaying seafood and salt, waves crash, but the ocean appears spectral, or something else and more dreadful. It’s just profoundly ominous and every time I travel to the shore in the evening I recall this tale that ruined the ocean after dark for me – positively.

The newlyweds – the wife is youthful, he’s not – go back to their lodging and find out the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and mortality and youth meets danse macabre chaos. It’s a chilling contemplation about longing and decline, two people aging together as a couple, the bond and aggression and gentleness in matrimony.

Not merely the most terrifying, but perhaps one of the best concise narratives out there, and a personal favourite. I read it en español, in the initial publication of this author’s works to be released in Argentina several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into Zombie near the water overseas recently. Despite the sunshine I felt an icy feeling through me. I also experienced the thrill of anticipation. I was composing my third novel, and I encountered an obstacle. I was uncertain if there was an effective approach to write various frightening aspects the book contains. Going through this book, I saw that there was a way.

Published in 1995, the book is a grim journey through the mind of a criminal, Quentin P, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who killed and dismembered 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, the killer was consumed with making a compliant victim who would stay by his side and attempted numerous macabre trials to do so.

The actions the novel describes are appalling, but similarly terrifying is the mental realism. The character’s terrible, fragmented world is directly described using minimal words, names redacted. The reader is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, forced to observe mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The alien nature of his mind resembles a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated on a desolate planet. Starting this book is not just reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel by a gifted writer

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the terror included a vision in which I was confined within an enclosure and, as I roused, I discovered that I had torn off a part off the window, trying to get out. That home was crumbling; when it rained heavily the ground floor corridor flooded, fly larvae dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and at one time a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in the bedroom.

When a friend gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere at my family home, but the story regarding the building located on the coastline seemed recognizable in my view, nostalgic as I felt. It’s a story about a haunted loud, emotional house and a female character who consumes calcium off the rocks. I cherished the book immensely and went back again and again to it, always finding {something