Horror Writers Share the Scariest Tales They have Ever Encountered

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by a master of suspense

I encountered this tale years ago and it has stayed with me ever since. The named vacationers happen to be the Allisons urban dwellers, who occupy the same off-grid country cottage every summer. On this occasion, instead of heading back to the city, they decide to prolong their stay a few more weeks – a decision that to unsettle each resident in the surrounding community. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that no one has remained in the area past Labor Day. Even so, the couple insist to stay, and at that point things start to get increasingly weird. The individual who delivers fuel refuses to sell for them. Not a single person will deliver groceries to the cottage, and at the time the family try to go to the village, their vehicle won’t start. A tempest builds, the batteries in the radio diminish, and as darkness falls, “the two old people clung to each other within their rental and expected”. What might be they expecting? What could the locals understand? Whenever I revisit Jackson’s disturbing and influential tale, I remember that the finest fright originates in what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes from a noted author

In this brief tale a couple go to an ordinary beach community where church bells toll constantly, a constant chiming that is irritating and unexplainable. The first truly frightening scene happens during the evening, as they decide to take a walk and they are unable to locate the sea. There’s sand, there is the odor of putrid marine life and seawater, waves crash, but the sea seems phantom, or another thing and more dreadful. It’s just deeply malevolent and every time I visit to a beach after dark I recall this tale that ruined the sea at night to my mind – positively.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – return to their lodging and learn the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of confinement, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth encounters grim ballet bedlam. It is a disturbing contemplation on desire and decline, a pair of individuals maturing in tandem as spouses, the bond and brutality and gentleness within wedlock.

Not only the most terrifying, but perhaps one of the best concise narratives out there, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of Aickman stories to be published in this country in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I perused this book by a pool in France in 2020. Although it was sunny I felt cold creep over me. I also felt the excitement of anticipation. I was composing my third novel, and I faced a block. I didn’t know whether there existed a proper method to write various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Experiencing this novel, I realized that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the book is a grim journey within the psyche of a young serial killer, the main character, modeled after an infamous individual, the murderer who killed and cut apart 17 young men and boys in a city over a decade. Notoriously, this person was fixated with making a submissive individual who would never leave by his side and made many macabre trials to achieve this.

The deeds the story tells are horrific, but just as scary is its psychological persuasiveness. The protagonist’s awful, broken reality is plainly told using minimal words, names redacted. The reader is immersed caught in his thoughts, forced to witness mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The strangeness of his psyche resembles a tangible impact – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Entering Zombie is less like reading but a complete immersion. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I walked in my sleep and subsequently commenced having night terrors. Once, the fear featured a vision during which I was stuck inside a container and, upon awakening, I realized that I had torn off the slat off the window, attempting to escape. That home was falling apart; when it rained heavily the entranceway filled with water, maggots came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and at one time a large rat ascended the window coverings in my sister’s room.

After an acquaintance presented me with this author’s book, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the story about the home located on the coastline felt familiar to myself, nostalgic as I felt. It’s a story featuring a possessed loud, atmospheric home and a girl who ingests limestone from the cliffs. I cherished the novel deeply and went back repeatedly to it, consistently uncovering {something