Frightening Novelists Share the Most Terrifying Narratives They have Ever Encountered
Andrew Michael Hurley
The Summer People by a master of suspense
I encountered this narrative long ago and it has lingered with me from that moment. The named vacationers happen to be the Allisons from New York, who occupy an identical off-grid lakeside house annually. On this occasion, in place of heading back to urban life, they choose to prolong their stay for a month longer – a decision that to disturb all the locals in the surrounding community. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that no one has ever stayed by the water past the holiday. Even so, the Allisons are determined to not leave, and that’s when situations commence to grow more bizarre. The individual who supplies fuel refuses to sell to them. Nobody is willing to supply groceries to the cabin, and when they try to go to the village, the automobile fails to start. A storm gathers, the energy in the radio diminish, and when night comes, “the elderly couple huddled together in their summer cottage and waited”. What are the Allisons expecting? What could the residents understand? Whenever I read Jackson’s unnerving and influential narrative, I’m reminded that the finest fright originates in the unspoken.
An Acclaimed Writer
An Eerie Story from a noted author
In this short story two people go to an ordinary coastal village where bells ring continuously, an incessant ringing that is annoying and inexplicable. The opening extremely terrifying moment happens at night, when they opt to take a walk and they can’t find the ocean. There’s sand, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and brine, surf is audible, but the ocean is a ghost, or another thing and more dreadful. It’s just deeply malevolent and every time I visit to the shore in the evening I remember this story that destroyed the beach in the evening for me – favorably.
The newlyweds – she’s very young, the husband is older – head back to the inn and find out the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and demise and innocence intersects with grim ballet pandemonium. It is a disturbing meditation on desire and decay, two bodies growing old jointly as spouses, the bond and violence and affection of marriage.
Not merely the most frightening, but probably a top example of brief tales out there, and a beloved choice. I experienced it en español, in the debut release of Aickman stories to be published in Argentina in 2011.
Catriona Ward
A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer
I perused this book near the water in the French countryside a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I felt a chill over me. I also felt the electricity of fascination. I was composing my third novel, and I faced an obstacle. I didn’t know if there was any good way to craft some of the fearful things the book contains. Experiencing this novel, I understood that it was possible.
Published in 1995, the novel is a grim journey within the psyche of a young serial killer, the main character, based on a notorious figure, the serial killer who killed and dismembered numerous individuals in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, this person was obsessed with making a zombie sex slave who would never leave with him and made many horrific efforts to accomplish it.
The acts the novel describes are horrific, but equally frightening is its own emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s dreadful, fragmented world is directly described with concise language, names redacted. You is plunged trapped in his consciousness, forced to witness mental processes and behaviors that appal. The alien nature of his psyche resembles a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Starting Zombie is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.
Daisy Johnson
White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi
When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and later started having night terrors. Once, the fear involved a nightmare during which I was confined inside a container and, upon awakening, I discovered that I had ripped a part off the window, trying to get out. That building was crumbling; when storms came the entranceway became inundated, maggots came down from the roof onto the bed, and once a big rodent scaled the curtains in that space.
After an acquaintance presented me with this author’s book, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the tale of the house high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to me, longing at that time. This is a book about a haunted loud, sentimental building and a female character who ingests chalk from the shoreline. I cherished the book deeply and returned frequently to the story, consistently uncovering {something
