Frightening Writers Reveal the Most Frightening Narratives They have Ever Encountered

Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by a master of suspense

I discovered this story years ago and it has lingered with me since then. The titular “summer people” happen to be a couple from New York, who rent a particular off-grid lakeside house every summer. On this occasion, in place of returning home, they opt to extend their stay for a month longer – a decision that to alarm all the locals in the surrounding community. Each repeats a similar vague warning that not a soul has lingered at the lake past the end of summer. Regardless, the Allisons are determined to remain, and that’s when events begin to become stranger. The person who supplies fuel declines to provide for them. Not a single person is willing to supply groceries to the cabin, and as the family endeavor to travel to the community, the automobile won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the batteries of their radio die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple clung to each other within their rental and waited”. What could be the Allisons anticipating? What do the residents know? Whenever I peruse this author’s chilling and inspiring story, I remember that the finest fright originates in what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by a noted author

In this concise narrative a couple journey to a typical beach community where bells ring continuously, a constant chiming that is annoying and puzzling. The first very scary moment occurs during the evening, at the time they opt to walk around and they fail to see the ocean. The beach is there, the scent exists of putrid marine life and seawater, waves crash, but the ocean seems phantom, or another thing and more dreadful. It is truly profoundly ominous and each occasion I travel to the coast in the evening I remember this story that ruined the ocean after dark to my mind – in a good way.

The young couple – the woman is adolescent, the husband is older – go back to the hotel and learn why the bells ring, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden intersects with grim ballet chaos. It is a disturbing reflection regarding craving and deterioration, a pair of individuals aging together as spouses, the bond and brutality and tenderness in matrimony.

Not just the most terrifying, but likely one of the best short stories out there, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of this author’s works to appear in this country in 2011.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into Zombie by a pool in France recently. Even with the bright weather I sensed a chill within me. I also experienced the thrill of anticipation. I was working on my third novel, and I had hit a wall. I didn’t know if there was an effective approach to craft some of the fearful things the book contains. Reading Zombie, I saw that it was possible.

Published in 1995, the story is a grim journey through the mind of a murderer, Quentin P, based on a notorious figure, the murderer who killed and dismembered multiple victims in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, Dahmer was fixated with creating a zombie sex slave that would remain him and carried out several grisly attempts to accomplish it.

The actions the novel describes are horrific, but just as scary is the mental realism. The character’s dreadful, fragmented world is simply narrated using minimal words, identities hidden. The reader is immersed trapped in his consciousness, obliged to observe ideas and deeds that horrify. The alien nature of his psyche resembles a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Going into this book feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and later started suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the fear included a nightmare where I was confined in a box and, upon awakening, I realized that I had removed the slat out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That home was falling apart; when storms came the ground floor corridor flooded, maggots came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and at one time a sizeable vermin climbed the drapes in that space.

When a friend handed me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living in my childhood residence, but the narrative regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to me, longing at that time. It is a book concerning a ghostly loud, sentimental building and a girl who ingests chalk from the cliffs. I loved the book deeply and returned again and again to it, consistently uncovering {something