Scary Writers Reveal the Scariest Tales They've Actually Experienced

A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I discovered this narrative long ago and it has stayed with me ever since. The titular “summer people” turn out to be a family urban dwellers, who occupy an identical off-grid rural cabin annually. This time, instead of heading back to urban life, they choose to lengthen their vacation an extra month – something that seems to disturb each resident in the nearby town. Each repeats a similar vague warning that nobody has remained by the water beyond the end of summer. Even so, they are resolved to stay, and at that point situations commence to grow more bizarre. The individual who delivers the kerosene declines to provide to the couple. No one agrees to bring food to the cabin, and at the time the Allisons attempt to drive into town, their vehicle refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the batteries of their radio diminish, and when night comes, “the two old people clung to each other inside their cabin and waited”. What could be the Allisons waiting for? What do the townspeople be aware of? Whenever I read this author’s unnerving and inspiring narrative, I recall that the top terror stems from that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative two people travel to a common beach community where bells ring continuously, an incessant ringing that is irritating and unexplainable. The first very scary episode happens at night, when they decide to go for a stroll and they can’t find the sea. The beach is there, there is the odor of decaying seafood and seawater, waves crash, but the sea seems phantom, or another thing and worse. It’s just deeply malevolent and every time I go to a beach after dark I recall this story that destroyed the ocean after dark to my mind – in a good way.

The young couple – she’s very young, he’s not – return to the inn and discover the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and mortality and youth meets grim ballet bedlam. It’s an unnerving reflection regarding craving and decline, two people growing old jointly as a couple, the bond and violence and affection of marriage.

Not merely the most frightening, but likely a top example of short stories available, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of this author’s works to be released in this country in 2011.

Catriona Ward

Zombie from an esteemed writer

I delved into Zombie beside the swimming area overseas a few years ago. Although it was sunny I experienced cold creep within me. I also experienced the electricity of fascination. I was working on my third novel, and I had hit an obstacle. I didn’t know whether there existed any good way to write various frightening aspects the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I realized that it was possible.

Published in 1995, the story is a grim journey into the thoughts of a criminal, the protagonist, modeled after an infamous individual, the criminal who killed and dismembered 17 young men and boys in a city over a decade. Infamously, the killer was obsessed with creating a compliant victim that would remain with him and attempted numerous horrific efforts to accomplish it.

The actions the novel describes are terrible, but equally frightening is its own psychological persuasiveness. The character’s awful, shattered existence is directly described using minimal words, names redacted. The audience is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, compelled to see ideas and deeds that shock. The foreignness of his mind feels like a physical shock – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Going into this book is less like reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I sleepwalked and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. Once, the terror featured a dream where I was stuck within an enclosure and, upon awakening, I realized that I had torn off a piece off the window, seeking to leave. That building was decaying; when storms came the ground floor corridor became inundated, maggots dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and at one time a big rodent ascended the window coverings in that space.

When a friend handed me the story, I had moved out with my parents, but the story about the home perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable to me, nostalgic at that time. This is a story about a haunted noisy, sentimental building and a girl who ingests chalk from the cliffs. I loved the book so much and came back frequently to its pages, always finding {something