Horror Novelists Discuss the Most Frightening Stories They've Ever Experienced

Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I encountered this narrative years ago and it has lingered with me ever since. The so-called seasonal visitors turn out to be a family from New York, who rent a particular off-grid lakeside house every summer. On this occasion, instead of going back to the city, they opt to prolong their stay a few more weeks – an action that appears to disturb everyone in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that nobody has remained at the lake past Labor Day. Nonetheless, the couple are determined to not leave, and that’s when events begin to grow more bizarre. The individual who delivers the kerosene refuses to sell to them. Nobody agrees to bring food to the cabin, and as the family endeavor to go to the village, the car won’t start. A tempest builds, the batteries of their radio fade, and as darkness falls, “the two old people crowded closely in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What are they anticipating? What might the locals know? Every time I read the writer’s unnerving and thought-provoking story, I recall that the finest fright originates in what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this short story a pair journey to a typical beach community in which chimes sound the whole time, a constant chiming that is irritating and unexplainable. The first extremely terrifying scene occurs at night, as they decide to take a walk and they can’t find the sea. The beach is there, there is the odor of putrid marine life and brine, surf is audible, but the sea is a ghost, or a different entity and even more alarming. It is simply deeply malevolent and each occasion I visit to a beach after dark I think about this narrative that destroyed the ocean after dark for me – favorably.

The newlyweds – she’s very young, he’s not – return to the hotel and find out the reason for the chiming, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden meets grim ballet pandemonium. It’s a chilling meditation regarding craving and deterioration, a pair of individuals aging together as partners, the bond and brutality and tenderness of marriage.

Not merely the most terrifying, but perhaps one of the best concise narratives in existence, and an individual preference. I encountered it en español, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to be released in this country in 2011.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this book beside the swimming area in the French countryside in 2020. Despite the sunshine I sensed an icy feeling through me. I also felt the thrill of anticipation. I was working on a new project, and I had hit a wall. I was uncertain if it was possible any good way to craft certain terrifying elements the book contains. Going through this book, I saw that it could be done.

Published in 1995, the novel is a grim journey within the psyche of a young serial killer, the protagonist, based on an infamous individual, the criminal who killed and cut apart multiple victims in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, Dahmer was fixated with creating a compliant victim who would never leave him and made many grisly attempts to achieve this.

The acts the story tells are horrific, but just as scary is its own emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s dreadful, broken reality is directly described with concise language, details omitted. The audience is plunged trapped in his consciousness, compelled to observe mental processes and behaviors that appal. The strangeness of his thinking feels like a tangible impact – or being stranded in an empty realm. Entering Zombie feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced experiencing nightmares. At one point, the terror involved a vision during which I was stuck inside a container and, upon awakening, I found that I had ripped the slat off the window, seeking to leave. That home was decaying; when storms came the entranceway became inundated, fly larvae fell from the ceiling onto the bed, and at one time a large rat scaled the curtains in my sister’s room.

Once a companion gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out with my parents, but the narrative about the home high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to me, nostalgic as I was. This is a story about a haunted loud, atmospheric home and a young woman who consumes chalk off the rocks. I cherished the book deeply and came back frequently to the story, always finding {something