Horror Writers Reveal the Most Frightening Narratives They've Actually Read

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I read this tale long ago and it has haunted me since then. The so-called vacationers turn out to be a couple urban dwellers, who occupy an identical off-grid country cottage annually. This time, instead of heading back to urban life, they choose to prolong their stay a few more weeks – an action that appears to alarm each resident in the surrounding community. All pass on a similar vague warning that no one has ever stayed in the area past the holiday. Even so, the Allisons are determined to not leave, and that is the moment situations commence to become stranger. The person who brings fuel refuses to sell for them. No one will deliver food to the cottage, and as the family endeavor to go to the village, the automobile fails to start. Bad weather approaches, the batteries in the radio fade, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple huddled together in their summer cottage and waited”. What are they expecting? What might the residents be aware of? Every time I peruse this author’s chilling and influential tale, I remember that the top terror comes from that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes from a noted author

In this concise narrative a couple travel to a common coastal village where bells ring the whole time, an incessant ringing that is irritating and unexplainable. The opening extremely terrifying episode happens during the evening, when they decide to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the water. The beach is there, there is the odor of putrid marine life and salt, there are waves, but the ocean seems phantom, or another thing and even more alarming. It’s just insanely sinister and every time I travel to a beach at night I remember this narrative that destroyed the ocean after dark for me – in a good way.

The young couple – she’s very young, the man is mature – return to the inn and find out the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and demise and innocence intersects with grim ballet bedlam. It’s an unnerving meditation on desire and deterioration, a pair of individuals aging together as spouses, the attachment and brutality and affection of marriage.

Not only the most frightening, but perhaps among the finest short stories out there, and a beloved choice. I experienced it en español, in the first edition of this author’s works to appear in Argentina several years back.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer

I read Zombie beside the swimming area in France a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I experienced a chill over me. I also experienced the electricity of excitement. I was working on a new project, and I had hit a wall. I was uncertain if there was a proper method to craft some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Going through this book, I saw that it was possible.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a dark flight into the thoughts of a criminal, Quentin P, inspired by a notorious figure, the criminal who slaughtered and mutilated multiple victims in a city between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, the killer was obsessed with making a submissive individual who would stay by his side and made many macabre trials to do so.

The acts the story tells are terrible, but just as scary is the psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s terrible, broken reality is simply narrated in spare prose, details omitted. The audience is sunk deep stuck in his mind, obliged to see mental processes and behaviors that appal. The alien nature of his mind feels like a physical shock – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Going into Zombie is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and later started suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the horror involved a vision where I was stuck in a box and, when I woke up, I realized that I had removed a piece out of the window frame, attempting to escape. That home was decaying; during heavy rain the ground floor corridor became inundated, fly larvae fell from the ceiling on to my parents’ bed, and at one time a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

Once a companion presented me with the story, I was no longer living with my parents, but the story regarding the building located on the coastline appeared known to myself, longing as I was. It’s a book concerning a ghostly clamorous, atmospheric home and a girl who eats limestone off the rocks. I adored the novel deeply and returned repeatedly to its pages, consistently uncovering {something