Scary Authors Share the Scariest Stories They have Actually Read
Andrew Michael Hurley
A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson
I discovered this narrative some time back and it has lingered with me ever since. The titular seasonal visitors happen to be the Allisons from New York, who occupy a particular off-grid lakeside house every summer. During this visit, instead of going back to urban life, they opt to prolong their holiday an extra month – a decision that to unsettle all the locals in the adjacent village. Each repeats a similar vague warning that not a soul has lingered in the area past the end of summer. Nonetheless, the couple are determined to remain, and that is the moment events begin to get increasingly weird. The person who brings the kerosene won’t sell for them. No one will deliver groceries to their home, and at the time the family endeavor to drive into town, the automobile fails to start. A storm gathers, the energy in the radio diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people clung to each other in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What are the Allisons waiting for? What do the locals be aware of? Every time I read Jackson’s disturbing and inspiring narrative, I’m reminded that the best horror comes from the unspoken.
An Acclaimed Writer
Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman
In this short story a pair travel to a common seaside town where bells ring continuously, a constant chiming that is bothersome and unexplainable. The opening very scary episode occurs after dark, as they choose to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the water. There’s sand, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and brine, waves crash, but the ocean seems phantom, or another thing and worse. It is truly deeply malevolent and each occasion I travel to the shore in the evening I recall this narrative that ruined the beach in the evening in my view – in a good way.
The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – head back to the hotel and learn the reason for the chiming, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth intersects with grim ballet chaos. It’s a chilling meditation about longing and deterioration, two bodies aging together as partners, the attachment and brutality and tenderness in matrimony.
Not only the most terrifying, but probably among the finest short stories out there, and an individual preference. I encountered it in Spanish, in the first edition of this author’s works to appear locally a decade ago.
A Prominent Novelist
A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates
I delved into this narrative beside the swimming area overseas recently. Although it was sunny I experienced cold creep through me. I also experienced the electricity of fascination. I was working on a new project, and I faced a wall. I was uncertain whether there existed an effective approach to write certain terrifying elements the book contains. Going through this book, I realized that it was possible.
First printed in the nineties, the story is a dark flight within the psyche of a murderer, the protagonist, inspired by a notorious figure, the serial killer who killed and dismembered multiple victims in a city over a decade. As is well-known, Dahmer was fixated with creating a submissive individual that would remain him and carried out several horrific efforts to do so.
The actions the book depicts are terrible, but equally frightening is its mental realism. Quentin P’s terrible, broken reality is simply narrated in spare prose, identities hidden. The reader is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, obliged to witness thoughts and actions that horrify. The foreignness of his mind feels like a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Starting this book feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are consumed entirely.
An Accomplished Author
A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi
In my early years, I walked in my sleep and later started suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the fear involved a dream during which I was trapped in a box and, when I woke up, I found that I had torn off a part out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That house was falling apart; during heavy rain the ground floor corridor filled with water, insect eggs dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a sizeable vermin climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.
When a friend presented me with this author’s book, I was residing elsewhere at my family home, but the story regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to myself, nostalgic as I felt. This is a book concerning a ghostly noisy, emotional house and a girl who eats chalk off the rocks. I loved the story deeply and came back frequently to it, each time discovering {something
