Scary Authors Reveal the Most Frightening Stories They have Actually Read

A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People by a master of suspense

I discovered this story some time back and it has stayed with me from that moment. The named “summer people” happen to be a family from New York, who occupy an identical remote lakeside house each year. On this occasion, instead of returning to the city, they choose to extend their holiday an extra month – an action that appears to disturb everyone in the nearby town. All pass on the same veiled caution that not a soul has remained in the area beyond Labor Day. Regardless, they are determined to remain, and at that point things start to grow more bizarre. The individual who brings oil declines to provide to the couple. Nobody is willing to supply food to the cabin, and at the time the Allisons try to drive into town, the automobile fails to start. A tempest builds, the power of their radio die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the aged individuals huddled together inside their cabin and anticipated”. What might be they expecting? What do the townspeople understand? Whenever I revisit the writer’s chilling and influential tale, I’m reminded that the top terror comes from what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a couple journey to a common beach community where bells ring constantly, a constant chiming that is bothersome and inexplicable. The first extremely terrifying episode occurs after dark, when they decide to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the water. The beach is there, there is the odor of putrid marine life and seawater, waves crash, but the sea is a ghost, or a different entity and worse. It is truly profoundly ominous and whenever I go to the coast at night I remember this tale which spoiled the sea at night in my view – in a good way.

The newlyweds – the wife is youthful, he’s not – return to their lodging and learn why the bells ring, during a prolonged scene of enclosed spaces, necro-orgy and mortality and youth intersects with danse macabre chaos. It’s an unnerving contemplation on desire and deterioration, two people aging together as spouses, the attachment and aggression and affection in matrimony.

Not only the scariest, but perhaps among the finest brief tales in existence, and a beloved choice. I read it en español, in the initial publication of these tales to appear in this country several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this narrative beside the swimming area in the French countryside recently. Although it was sunny I experienced cold creep within me. Additionally, I sensed the electricity of fascination. I was writing my latest book, and I encountered an obstacle. I was uncertain if there was any good way to compose various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Going through this book, I realized that it was possible.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a dark flight through the mind of a young serial killer, the main character, based on a notorious figure, the murderer who slaughtered and cut apart 17 young men and boys in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, this person was obsessed with producing a compliant victim that would remain with him and carried out several grisly attempts to do so.

The deeds the story tells are appalling, but equally frightening is its emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s awful, broken reality is plainly told using minimal words, identities hidden. The audience is plunged trapped in his consciousness, obliged to witness thoughts and actions that horrify. The foreignness of his mind is like 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 swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and later started having night terrors. Once, the fear included a vision during which I was stuck within an enclosure and, upon awakening, I discovered that I had removed the slat off the window, trying to get out. That house was crumbling; when it rained heavily the ground floor corridor flooded, maggots came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a sizeable vermin climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.

After an acquaintance handed me this author’s book, I was residing elsewhere at my family home, but the story regarding the building perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable in my view, nostalgic as I felt. It’s a book concerning a ghostly loud, sentimental building and a female character who ingests limestone off the rocks. I loved the story so much and went back again and again to its pages, each time discovering {something