Frightening Authors Reveal the Scariest Narratives They've Actually Experienced

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson

I discovered this narrative some time back and it has haunted me ever since. The titular seasonal visitors happen to be a family urban dwellers, who occupy an identical isolated country cottage each year. During this visit, rather than heading back to urban life, they opt to lengthen their holiday an extra month – a decision that to alarm everyone in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that no one has ever stayed at the lake past Labor Day. Even so, the Allisons are resolved to not leave, and that is the moment things start to grow more bizarre. The individual who delivers the kerosene won’t sell to them. No one will deliver supplies to the cabin, and as the family try to go to the village, their vehicle won’t start. A tempest builds, the energy in the radio diminish, and when night comes, “the elderly couple huddled together within their rental and expected”. What are this couple anticipating? What could the residents understand? Each occasion I revisit the writer’s unnerving and inspiring story, I remember that the top terror comes from what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative two people travel to an ordinary beach community where bells ring the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and inexplicable. The first very scary scene takes place at night, at the time they opt to take a walk and they fail to see the sea. Sand is present, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and brine, there are waves, but the sea is a ghost, or another thing and even more alarming. It’s just profoundly ominous and whenever I travel to the coast in the evening I think about this tale that destroyed the beach in the evening to my mind – in a good way.

The young couple – the woman is adolescent, the husband is older – return to the hotel and learn why the bells ring, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and death-and-the-maiden encounters grim ballet chaos. It’s an unnerving contemplation on desire and decay, two bodies growing old jointly as partners, the connection and aggression and gentleness in matrimony.

Not merely the most terrifying, but likely a top example of short stories out there, and a personal favourite. I experienced it en español, in the initial publication of these tales to be released locally in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I perused this narrative near the water in France recently. Although it was sunny I experienced a chill through me. I also felt the excitement of anticipation. I was writing my third novel, and I had hit a wall. I didn’t know whether there existed any good way to write certain terrifying elements the book contains. Going through this book, I realized that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a grim journey through the mind of a criminal, the main character, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who slaughtered and dismembered multiple victims in a city between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, this person was obsessed with making a submissive individual who would stay with him and made many macabre trials to accomplish it.

The actions the story tells are appalling, but just as scary is the psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s dreadful, fragmented world is directly described using minimal words, names redacted. You is immersed stuck in his mind, compelled to witness ideas and deeds that appal. The foreignness of his psyche feels like a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated on a desolate planet. Entering Zombie is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and eventually began experiencing nightmares. On one occasion, the horror featured a dream where I was stuck inside a container and, upon awakening, I discovered that I had torn off a part from the window, attempting to escape. That house was crumbling; during heavy rain the ground floor corridor became inundated, maggots came down from the roof into the bedroom, and once a large rat ascended the window coverings in the bedroom.

Once a companion gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living at my family home, but the tale of the house high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar in my view, longing at that time. It is a book featuring a possessed noisy, emotional house and a girl who ingests chalk off the rocks. I loved the story so much and came back repeatedly to it, each time discovering {something