Frightening Writers Share the Scariest Narratives They have Ever Read
Andrew Michael Hurley
The Summer People by a master of suspense
I encountered this narrative some time back and it has lingered with me from that moment. The titular “summer people” happen to be a family urban dwellers, who rent an identical isolated rural cabin each year. During this visit, instead of heading back to the city, they decide to lengthen their holiday for a month longer – a decision that to unsettle everyone in the adjacent village. All pass on the same veiled caution that no one has ever stayed in the area beyond the end of summer. Nonetheless, the Allisons are determined to remain, and that’s when situations commence to grow more bizarre. The man who supplies the kerosene won’t sell to the couple. Nobody will deliver supplies to the cabin, and as they try to drive into town, the automobile fails to start. A storm gathers, the batteries within the device die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple clung to each other within their rental and anticipated”. What might be this couple waiting for? What might the locals know? Whenever I revisit the writer’s disturbing and thought-provoking tale, I remember that the top terror stems from the unspoken.
An Acclaimed Writer
Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman
In this short story a pair go to a common beach community where bells ring the whole time, an incessant ringing that is irritating and puzzling. The first extremely terrifying moment happens during the evening, at the time they choose to take a walk and they are unable to locate the ocean. There’s sand, the scent exists of putrid marine life and brine, surf is audible, but the ocean appears spectral, or a different entity and even more alarming. It is simply insanely sinister and each occasion I visit to the shore after dark I recall this tale that ruined the beach in the evening to my mind – favorably.
The newlyweds – she’s very young, he’s not – go back to their lodging and learn why the bells ring, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, necro-orgy and death-and-the-maiden encounters dance of death bedlam. It’s an unnerving reflection about longing and decay, two bodies maturing in tandem as spouses, the bond and aggression and tenderness within wedlock.
Not only the scariest, but perhaps among the finest short stories in existence, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to be released in this country a decade ago.
A Prominent Novelist
A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates
I read this narrative by a pool in France in 2020. Although it was sunny I sensed cold creep within me. Additionally, I sensed the electricity of fascination. I was working on my third novel, and I encountered a block. I didn’t know if it was possible an effective approach to compose certain terrifying elements the story includes. Going through this book, I realized that it could be done.
Published in 1995, the novel is a dark flight through the mind of a young serial killer, the protagonist, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who murdered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in a city between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, the killer was fixated with making a zombie sex slave who would never leave him and attempted numerous macabre trials to achieve this.
The acts the story tells are appalling, but equally frightening is the emotional authenticity. The character’s awful, broken reality is directly described using minimal words, names redacted. The audience is plunged stuck in his mind, obliged to see thoughts and actions that horrify. The foreignness of his psyche feels like a tangible impact – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Going into this book is not just reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.
An Accomplished Author
A Haunting Novel by a gifted writer
During my youth, I was a somnambulist and eventually began experiencing nightmares. Once, the horror included a vision where I was trapped inside a container and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had removed a part off the window, trying to get out. That house was decaying; during heavy rain the ground floor corridor filled with water, maggots dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a big rodent ascended the window coverings in that space.
When a friend handed me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere in my childhood residence, but the narrative about the home located on the coastline appeared known to myself, homesick as I was. This is a story featuring a possessed noisy, atmospheric home and a young woman who consumes calcium from the cliffs. I loved the book immensely and went back frequently to its pages, each time discovering {something
