Scary Writers Reveal the Scariest Tales They've Actually Read
A Renowned Horror Author
The Summer People by a master of suspense
I read this story some time back and it has lingered with me ever since. The named seasonal visitors turn out to be a family from the city, who lease a particular isolated rural cabin every summer. This time, in place of going back to the city, they choose to lengthen their vacation for a month longer – something that seems to unsettle everyone in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that no one has ever stayed at the lake after Labor Day. Nonetheless, the couple are resolved to remain, and that’s when events begin to grow more bizarre. The person who supplies fuel declines to provide to the couple. Nobody will deliver food to the cabin, and at the time they endeavor to go to the village, the automobile fails to start. A tempest builds, the power in the radio diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple huddled together within their rental and expected”. What could be the Allisons waiting for? What do the townspeople be aware of? Each occasion I peruse Jackson’s unnerving and influential tale, I remember that the top terror originates in that which remains hidden.
An Acclaimed Writer
Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman
In this concise narrative two people go to a common coastal village in which chimes sound the whole time, an incessant ringing that is irritating and puzzling. The initial extremely terrifying scene happens after dark, as they opt to take a walk and they fail to see the water. Sand is present, there is the odor of rotting fish and salt, waves crash, but the ocean appears spectral, or another thing and even more alarming. It is truly profoundly ominous and whenever I travel to the coast at night I think about this story that destroyed the sea at night in my view – favorably.
The young couple – the woman is adolescent, the husband is older – return to the inn and discover why the bells ring, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and demise and innocence encounters danse macabre chaos. It’s an unnerving reflection about longing and deterioration, two bodies maturing in tandem as a couple, the bond and violence and tenderness of marriage.
Not just the most terrifying, but probably one of the best concise narratives available, and an individual preference. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of these tales to be published in Argentina in 2011.
A Prominent Novelist
Zombie from an esteemed writer
I read this book beside the swimming area in France recently. Despite the sunshine I experienced an icy feeling over me. I also felt the excitement of fascination. I was working on my latest book, and I had hit an obstacle. I was uncertain whether there existed a proper method to compose some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Going through this book, I saw that it could be done.
Released decades ago, the book is a bleak exploration into the thoughts of a criminal, the protagonist, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who slaughtered and mutilated multiple victims in a city between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, Dahmer was consumed with making a zombie sex slave who would stay with him and made many grisly attempts to achieve this.
The acts the story tells are terrible, but similarly terrifying is the mental realism. Quentin P’s dreadful, shattered existence is simply narrated in spare prose, identities hidden. You is plunged trapped in his consciousness, obliged to see ideas and deeds that shock. The strangeness of his mind resembles a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Going into this book is less like reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.
Daisy Johnson
A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi
When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and subsequently commenced suffering from bad dreams. Once, the horror included a dream in which I was trapped in a box and, when I woke up, I found that I had ripped the slat from the window, seeking to leave. That house was falling apart; during heavy rain the downstairs hall filled with water, maggots fell from the ceiling onto the bed, and once a large rat climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.
After an acquaintance presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out at my family home, but the story of the house perched on the cliffs felt familiar in my view, homesick as I was. It is a novel featuring a possessed noisy, atmospheric home and a girl who eats chalk from the shoreline. I adored the book deeply and returned frequently to the story, each time discovering {something
