Scary Novelists Reveal the Most Terrifying Narratives They've Actually Encountered

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense

I read this narrative some time back and it has haunted me from that moment. The so-called “summer people” are a family from New York, who occupy a particular isolated lakeside house every summer. During this visit, rather than heading back to the city, they opt to prolong their holiday a few more weeks – something that seems to alarm all the locals in the surrounding community. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that nobody has remained at the lake after the holiday. Regardless, the Allisons are determined to remain, and that’s when events begin to become stranger. The person who supplies the kerosene refuses to sell to them. Nobody is willing to supply groceries to the cottage, and when the Allisons endeavor to drive into town, the automobile refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the batteries of their radio diminish, and when night comes, “the two old people clung to each other in their summer cottage and expected”. What might be they expecting? What might the locals know? Each occasion I read Jackson’s chilling and inspiring tale, I remember that the finest fright stems from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by a noted author

In this concise narrative two people travel to a common beach community in which chimes sound continuously, a perpetual pealing that is irritating and inexplicable. The initial extremely terrifying moment takes place at night, when they decide to go for a stroll and they fail to see the water. There’s sand, there is the odor of putrid marine life and brine, there are waves, but the ocean appears spectral, or something else and more dreadful. It is simply insanely sinister and each occasion I visit to a beach in the evening I remember this story that destroyed the sea at night to my mind – positively.

The recent spouses – she’s very young, the man is mature – head back to their lodging and learn why the bells ring, in a long sequence of confinement, necro-orgy and demise and innocence intersects with grim ballet chaos. It’s an unnerving reflection on desire and decay, two people aging together as spouses, the attachment and brutality and gentleness of marriage.

Not just the most frightening, but probably one of the best concise narratives available, and a beloved choice. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of these tales to be released in Argentina in 2011.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I delved into Zombie by a pool in France a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I experienced cold creep through me. I also felt the thrill of excitement. I was working on my latest book, and I had hit a block. I wasn’t sure whether there existed any good way to write various frightening aspects the book contains. Experiencing this novel, I realized that it could be done.

Published in 1995, the book is a grim journey within the psyche of a criminal, Quentin P, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who murdered and dismembered multiple victims in Milwaukee during a specific period. Infamously, the killer was fixated with creating a zombie sex slave who would stay him and attempted numerous horrific efforts to do so.

The actions the book depicts are horrific, but equally frightening is its own psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s terrible, shattered existence is directly described with concise language, names redacted. The reader is plunged caught in his thoughts, obliged to observe mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The foreignness of his thinking resembles a tangible impact – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Going into Zombie is less like reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by a gifted writer

During my youth, I walked in my sleep and subsequently commenced having night terrors. At one point, the fear featured a dream in which I was confined inside a container and, when I woke up, I found that I had removed the slat out of the window frame, trying to get out. That building was crumbling; during heavy rain the downstairs hall filled with water, fly larvae dropped from above onto the bed, and once a large rat scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

Once a companion presented me with this author’s book, I was residing elsewhere at my family home, but the tale regarding the building located on the coastline seemed recognizable to me, homesick as I felt. This is a story about a haunted loud, sentimental building and a young woman who consumes calcium from the shoreline. I adored the novel immensely and went back again and again to it, each time discovering {something