Horror Novelists Reveal the Most Terrifying Narratives They've Actually Experienced

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I discovered this story some time back and it has lingered with me since then. The so-called “summer people” turn out to be a couple from the city, who rent the same remote lakeside house annually. This time, instead of heading back to the city, they opt to extend their stay a few more weeks – something that seems to unsettle everyone in the surrounding community. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that no one has remained by the water after Labor Day. Regardless, they are resolved to stay, and that’s when things start to become stranger. The person who supplies oil refuses to sell to them. No one is willing to supply groceries to their home, and at the time the Allisons try to go to the village, the car won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the batteries of their radio die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people clung to each other in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What could be they expecting? What might the locals be aware of? Every time I read Jackson’s unnerving and inspiring story, I remember that the best horror stems from what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by a noted author

In this concise narrative a pair go to a common seaside town where bells ring the whole time, a constant chiming that is bothersome and inexplicable. The first truly frightening scene takes place during the evening, as they decide to take a walk and they are unable to locate the sea. The beach is there, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and salt, there are waves, but the sea seems phantom, or another thing and even more alarming. It is simply profoundly ominous and every time I visit to the coast at night I remember this story that ruined the beach in the evening for me – positively.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, the husband is older – return to the hotel and find out the reason for the chiming, during a prolonged scene of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth intersects with danse macabre pandemonium. It’s an unnerving contemplation on desire and decline, two people maturing in tandem as spouses, the connection and aggression and affection within wedlock.

Not merely the most terrifying, but perhaps a top example of brief tales available, and an individual preference. I read it en español, in the initial publication of this author’s works to appear in this country several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this narrative near the water in France recently. Although it was sunny I experienced an icy feeling over me. I also felt the excitement of fascination. I was writing my third novel, and I faced a wall. I wasn’t sure if it was possible an effective approach to write certain terrifying elements the story includes. Going through this book, I realized that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a grim journey into the thoughts of a criminal, Quentin P, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who murdered and mutilated numerous individuals in the Midwest during a specific period. Infamously, Dahmer was obsessed with making a zombie sex slave that would remain by his side and carried out several horrific efforts to achieve this.

The deeds the story tells are appalling, but equally frightening is its own psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s terrible, fragmented world is plainly told with concise language, names redacted. The audience is immersed stuck in his mind, compelled to see thoughts and actions that horrify. The alien nature of his psyche feels like a physical shock – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Entering this story is less like reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and later started having night terrors. Once, the terror included a nightmare during which I was confined within an enclosure and, as I roused, I found that I had ripped the slat from the window, seeking to leave. That house was falling apart; during heavy rain the ground floor corridor flooded, insect eggs came down from the roof into the bedroom, and at one time a big rodent climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.

Once a companion gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out in my childhood residence, but the story regarding the building located on the coastline appeared known in my view, longing as I was. This is a story concerning a ghostly loud, sentimental building and a young woman who eats calcium from the shoreline. I cherished the novel so much and came back frequently to its pages, consistently uncovering {something