Horror Writers Discuss the Scariest Stories They've Ever Encountered

Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from a master of suspense

I discovered this narrative some time back and it has haunted me from that moment. The so-called vacationers turn out to be a family from New York, who lease an identical remote rural cabin each year. This time, rather than returning home, they choose to lengthen their vacation for a month longer – a decision that to alarm each resident in the adjacent village. Each repeats the same veiled caution that not a soul has ever stayed by the water beyond the end of summer. Regardless, the Allisons insist to not leave, and that is the moment things start to grow more bizarre. The person who supplies fuel won’t sell to the couple. No one will deliver supplies to the cabin, and as they endeavor to drive into town, their vehicle fails to start. A storm gathers, the batteries within the device die, and when night comes, “the two old people clung to each other within their rental and anticipated”. What could be this couple expecting? What could the locals understand? Whenever I revisit Jackson’s unnerving and influential story, I’m reminded that the best horror originates in that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes from a noted author

In this brief tale a couple journey to a common beach community in which chimes sound the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is annoying and unexplainable. The opening extremely terrifying scene takes place at night, as they opt to walk around and they can’t find the ocean. There’s sand, the scent exists of decaying seafood and salt, surf is audible, but the water seems phantom, or a different entity and more dreadful. It’s just profoundly ominous and each occasion I go to a beach at night I remember this story which spoiled the beach in the evening to my mind – positively.

The recent spouses – she’s very young, he’s not – return to the inn and find out why the bells ring, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and death-and-the-maiden intersects with grim ballet bedlam. It’s a chilling meditation regarding craving and deterioration, a pair of individuals growing old jointly as partners, the bond and violence and affection of marriage.

Not merely the most frightening, but perhaps among the finest short stories in existence, and a beloved choice. I experienced it en español, in the first edition of this author’s works to be released in Argentina in 2011.

Catriona Ward

Zombie from an esteemed writer

I read Zombie beside the swimming area overseas recently. Despite the sunshine I experienced cold creep through me. I also experienced the thrill of excitement. I was working on a new project, and I had hit a block. I was uncertain if it was possible a proper method to write various frightening aspects the story includes. Going through this book, I saw that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a grim journey within the psyche of a young serial killer, Quentin P, modeled after an infamous individual, the murderer who slaughtered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in a city between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, Dahmer was consumed with producing a zombie sex slave who would never leave him and attempted numerous horrific efforts to accomplish it.

The acts the book depicts are appalling, but just as scary is the mental realism. The protagonist’s dreadful, broken reality is simply narrated with concise language, identities hidden. The audience is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, forced to witness mental processes and behaviors that appal. The foreignness of his thinking resembles a bodily jolt – or getting lost in an empty realm. Starting this story is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and eventually began having night terrors. At one point, the terror involved a dream during which I was trapped within an enclosure and, upon awakening, I found that I had removed a piece out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That building was falling apart; during heavy rain the downstairs hall became inundated, insect eggs dropped from above into the bedroom, and on one occasion a large rat climbed the drapes in the bedroom.

When a friend presented me with the story, I was residing elsewhere at my family home, but the tale regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to myself, longing as I was. This is a book concerning a ghostly loud, atmospheric home and a female character who ingests chalk off the rocks. I adored the novel immensely and returned again and again to its pages, consistently uncovering {something