Frightening Writers Discuss the Most Frightening Tales They've Actually Experienced

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson

I read this narrative long ago and it has lingered with me from that moment. The titular “summer people” turn out to be a family from the city, who lease an identical remote lakeside house every summer. This time, instead of returning to the city, they opt to extend their stay for a month longer – a decision that to alarm all the locals in the adjacent village. Each repeats an identical cryptic advice that nobody has lingered in the area beyond the end of summer. Regardless, the couple are resolved to stay, and at that point things start to become stranger. The man who delivers fuel refuses to sell for them. No one will deliver food to the cottage, and as the Allisons endeavor to travel to the community, their vehicle fails to start. A storm gathers, the energy within the device fade, and when night comes, “the two old people huddled together in their summer cottage and expected”. What could be this couple waiting for? What could the locals know? Every time I peruse this author’s disturbing and influential story, I remember that the top terror stems from that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes by a noted author

In this brief tale a pair journey to a typical coastal village where church bells toll constantly, a constant chiming that is annoying and inexplicable. The first truly frightening moment takes place during the evening, at the time they opt to walk around and they can’t find the ocean. There’s sand, the scent exists of rotting fish and brine, there are waves, but the water is a ghost, or a different entity and more dreadful. It is truly insanely sinister and each occasion I travel to the coast at night I remember this tale that ruined the beach in the evening for me – in a good way.

The young couple – the woman is adolescent, the husband is older – go back to the inn and learn the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, necro-orgy and demise and innocence meets grim ballet chaos. It is a disturbing reflection about longing and decay, a pair of individuals growing old jointly as a couple, the attachment and violence and affection in matrimony.

Not only the most terrifying, but likely one of the best brief tales in existence, and a beloved choice. I read it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to be released in Argentina several years back.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this book beside the swimming area overseas recently. Despite the sunshine I experienced an icy feeling through me. Additionally, I sensed the electricity of excitement. I was working on a new project, and I encountered an obstacle. I didn’t know whether there existed a proper method to write various frightening aspects the book contains. Reading Zombie, I saw that it was possible.

Published in 1995, the novel is a dark flight through the mind of a murderer, the protagonist, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who killed and mutilated 17 young men and boys in the Midwest over a decade. Infamously, Dahmer was obsessed with creating a zombie sex slave who would never leave by his side and made many horrific efforts to do so.

The actions the story tells are horrific, but equally frightening is the psychological persuasiveness. The protagonist’s awful, shattered existence is simply narrated using minimal words, names redacted. The audience is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, compelled to see ideas and deeds that horrify. The alien nature of his mind resembles a tangible impact – or finding oneself isolated on a desolate planet. Going into this story is not just reading than a full body experience. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from a gifted writer

During my youth, I walked in my sleep and later started experiencing nightmares. At one point, the horror featured a nightmare during which I was trapped inside a container and, when I woke up, I realized that I had ripped a piece off the window, seeking to leave. That house was decaying; during heavy rain the ground floor corridor became inundated, fly larvae came down from the roof onto the bed, and on one occasion a big rodent climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.

When a friend handed me this author’s book, I was no longer living with my parents, but the narrative of the house perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable to me, nostalgic as I felt. It is a story about a haunted loud, emotional house and a girl who consumes limestone off the rocks. I cherished the story deeply and went back repeatedly to it, always finding {something