Frightening Authors Share the Most Frightening Stories They've Actually Experienced
Andrew Michael Hurley
The Summer People by Shirley Jackson
I encountered this tale some time back and it has stayed with me ever since. The named seasonal visitors turn out to be a family urban dwellers, who occupy a particular remote lakeside house annually. During this visit, in place of heading back to the city, they decide to extend their vacation an extra month – a decision that to unsettle everyone in the adjacent village. All pass on an identical cryptic advice that not a soul has lingered by the water beyond Labor Day. Even so, they are determined to not leave, and that is the moment things start to become stranger. The man who supplies fuel refuses to sell to the couple. Not a single person will deliver supplies to the cottage, and at the time they endeavor to drive into town, the car refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the energy within the device diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple clung to each other within their rental and anticipated”. What are they waiting for? What do the townspeople know? Each occasion I revisit Jackson’s disturbing and inspiring story, I recall that the finest fright stems from that which remains hidden.
Mariana Enríquez
An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman
In this concise narrative two people travel to a common beach community where bells ring constantly, a constant chiming that is bothersome and inexplicable. The opening truly frightening episode occurs after dark, as they choose to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the sea. There’s sand, there is the odor of putrid marine life and seawater, there are waves, but the sea seems phantom, or something else and more dreadful. It is simply deeply malevolent and whenever I go to the shore at night I recall this tale which spoiled the beach in the evening in my view – positively.
The young couple – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – return to the inn and learn why the bells ring, in a long sequence of confinement, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth meets dance of death chaos. It is a disturbing contemplation regarding craving and decline, two people maturing in tandem as a couple, the connection and violence and tenderness of marriage.
Not merely the most frightening, but probably a top example of brief tales in existence, and a personal favourite. I read it en español, in the initial publication of these tales to be released locally in 2011.
A Prominent Novelist
Zombie from an esteemed writer
I read this book beside the swimming area in the French countryside in 2020. Although it was sunny I sensed a chill through me. I also felt the thrill of fascination. I was writing my third novel, and I had hit an obstacle. I wasn’t sure if there was a proper method to craft certain terrifying elements the story includes. Reading Zombie, I saw that there was a way.
First printed in the nineties, the book is a dark flight within the psyche of a young serial killer, Quentin P, modeled after a notorious figure, the criminal who slaughtered and cut apart multiple victims in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, the killer was fixated with making a zombie sex slave who would stay him and made many horrific efforts to accomplish it.
The acts the novel describes are horrific, but similarly terrifying is its mental realism. The character’s dreadful, broken reality is simply narrated in spare prose, names redacted. The reader is sunk deep stuck in his mind, forced to see thoughts and actions that horrify. The alien nature of his mind resembles a bodily jolt – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Entering Zombie feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are swallowed whole.
Daisy Johnson
A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi
When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and later started having night terrors. On one occasion, the horror featured a dream during which I was stuck inside a container and, as I roused, I discovered that I had removed a part out of the window frame, trying to get out. That home was decaying; when it rained heavily the entranceway flooded, insect eggs fell from the ceiling on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a large rat climbed the drapes in that space.
When a friend gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living at my family home, but the tale regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to me, nostalgic at that time. It is a book concerning a ghostly clamorous, atmospheric home and a girl who ingests calcium from the cliffs. I adored the book so much and went back repeatedly to it, always finding {something
