Scary Writers Discuss the Scariest Stories They have Actually Read

Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from a master of suspense

I discovered this story years ago and it has haunted me ever since. The titular vacationers turn out to be a couple from the city, who lease the same remote lakeside house every summer. On this occasion, rather than going back home, they opt to lengthen their holiday an extra month – something that seems to alarm all the locals in the surrounding community. Each repeats a similar vague warning that nobody has remained by the water beyond the end of summer. Regardless, the Allisons are resolved to remain, and that is the moment events begin to become stranger. The individual who delivers the kerosene refuses to sell to them. Nobody is willing to supply food to the cottage, and at the time the family attempt to travel to the community, the car refuses to operate. A storm gathers, the energy within the device fade, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple huddled together inside their cabin and expected”. What could be the Allisons waiting for? What might the locals understand? Each occasion I peruse this author’s disturbing and thought-provoking tale, I recall that the finest fright originates in what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this short story a pair journey to an ordinary coastal village in which chimes sound constantly, a constant chiming that is annoying and puzzling. The first truly frightening scene takes place during the evening, when they opt to go for a stroll and they fail to see the ocean. Sand is present, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and salt, surf is audible, but the ocean appears spectral, or something else and worse. It’s just deeply malevolent and every time I visit to the coast in the evening I remember this narrative which spoiled the sea at night in my view – favorably.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, he’s not – go back to their lodging and discover the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, necro-orgy and death-and-the-maiden encounters grim ballet chaos. It is a disturbing reflection on desire and deterioration, two people aging together as a couple, the bond and brutality and gentleness in matrimony.

Not just the most frightening, but probably one of the best concise narratives out there, and an individual preference. I read it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of Aickman stories to be released in this country several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from an esteemed writer

I delved into Zombie beside the swimming area overseas in 2020. Even with the bright weather I experienced an icy feeling within me. Additionally, I sensed the excitement of anticipation. I was writing my third novel, and I had hit a wall. I wasn’t sure if it was possible any good way to craft various frightening aspects the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I saw that it could be done.

Published in 1995, the novel is a bleak exploration through the mind of a murderer, the main character, based on an infamous individual, the criminal who killed and cut apart numerous individuals in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, the killer was obsessed with making a zombie sex slave who would stay by his side and made many macabre trials to achieve this.

The acts the novel describes are horrific, but equally frightening is its emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s dreadful, shattered existence is plainly told in spare prose, names redacted. The audience is plunged caught in his thoughts, obliged to observe mental processes and behaviors that shock. The strangeness of his mind resembles a bodily jolt – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Starting this book feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

In my early years, I was a somnambulist and eventually began experiencing nightmares. At one point, the fear included a dream where I was trapped within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had ripped a part from the window, seeking to leave. That home was falling apart; when it rained heavily the ground floor corridor became inundated, maggots dropped from above onto the bed, and at one time a large rat ascended the window coverings in the bedroom.

After an acquaintance gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere at my family home, but the story regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs appeared known to me, homesick as I felt. It’s a book concerning a ghostly clamorous, emotional house and a young woman who eats limestone from the shoreline. I loved the story deeply and went back repeatedly to its pages, always finding {something