Scary Novelists Share the Most Frightening Stories They've Actually Experienced
Andrew Michael Hurley
A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson
I read this tale years ago and it has haunted me ever since. The so-called seasonal visitors are a couple urban dwellers, who lease an identical off-grid lakeside house every summer. During this visit, rather than going back home, they decide to lengthen their holiday for a month longer – an action that appears to disturb each resident in the nearby town. All pass on an identical cryptic advice that no one has remained by the water after Labor Day. Even so, the couple are resolved to stay, and at that point things start to get increasingly weird. The individual who delivers oil refuses to sell to the couple. Not a single person is willing to supply food to the cabin, and at the time the Allisons try to drive into town, their vehicle refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the batteries of their radio die, and when night comes, “the two old people clung to each other within their rental and expected”. What could be they expecting? What might the townspeople understand? Every time I revisit Jackson’s chilling and inspiring tale, I’m reminded that the best horror originates in the unspoken.
An Acclaimed Writer
Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman
In this concise narrative a couple go to an ordinary beach community in which chimes sound constantly, a perpetual pealing that is irritating and unexplainable. The opening truly frightening episode happens at night, as they choose to walk around and they fail to see the water. Sand is present, the scent exists of putrid marine life and brine, waves crash, but the ocean is a ghost, or something else and more dreadful. It is truly profoundly ominous and whenever I visit to a beach in the evening I remember this tale that ruined the sea at night to my mind – favorably.
The newlyweds – she’s very young, he’s not – return to the hotel and learn the cause of the ringing, during a prolonged scene of confinement, gruesome festivities and demise and innocence intersects with grim ballet chaos. It’s an unnerving reflection on desire and decline, two people growing old jointly as partners, the connection and brutality and gentleness in matrimony.
Not merely the scariest, but perhaps among the finest short stories out there, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to be released in Argentina a decade ago.
A Prominent Novelist
Zombie from an esteemed writer
I delved into this narrative beside the swimming area in the French countryside in 2020. Even with the bright weather I felt an icy feeling within me. Additionally, I sensed the thrill of anticipation. I was working on my latest book, and I encountered a block. I wasn’t sure whether there existed any good way to craft various frightening aspects the book contains. Reading Zombie, I saw that it could be done.
Published in 1995, the novel is a dark flight into the thoughts of a young serial killer, the protagonist, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who murdered and mutilated multiple victims in the Midwest during a specific period. Infamously, the killer was obsessed with producing a zombie sex slave who would never leave by his side and made many grisly attempts to achieve this.
The actions the story tells are appalling, but similarly terrifying is its psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s dreadful, fragmented world is simply narrated using minimal words, details omitted. You is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, compelled to observe thoughts and actions that shock. The foreignness of his mind is like a physical shock – or getting lost in an empty realm. Entering Zombie feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are consumed entirely.
An Accomplished Author
A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi
During my youth, I was a somnambulist and subsequently commenced experiencing nightmares. At one point, the fear involved a nightmare where I was trapped within an enclosure and, as I roused, I found that I had ripped a piece out of the window frame, attempting to escape. That house was decaying; when it rained heavily the entranceway became inundated, insect eggs fell from the ceiling on to my parents’ bed, and at one time a large rat scaled the curtains in that space.
After an acquaintance gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out in my childhood residence, but the tale regarding the building located on the coastline felt familiar to myself, nostalgic as I was. It’s a book featuring a possessed noisy, atmospheric home and a young woman who ingests chalk off the rocks. I loved the story so much and went back repeatedly to its pages, consistently uncovering {something
