Scary Writers Share the Most Terrifying Stories They have Actually Read

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson

I read this tale long ago and it has stayed with me ever since. The so-called seasonal visitors are a family from New York, who lease an identical isolated rural cabin annually. During this visit, instead of returning to the city, they opt to lengthen their vacation an extra month – something that seems to unsettle all the locals in the adjacent village. All pass on a similar vague warning that no one has remained by the water beyond the end of summer. Even so, the Allisons are resolved to remain, and at that point things start to get increasingly weird. The man who delivers the kerosene refuses to sell for them. Not a single person is willing to supply food to the cabin, and when they endeavor to travel to the community, their vehicle won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the batteries in the radio diminish, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple huddled together inside their cabin and anticipated”. What might be they waiting for? What do the townspeople know? Whenever I read the writer’s chilling and inspiring narrative, I recall that the best horror comes from that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by a noted author

In this concise narrative a pair go to a common beach community where church bells toll continuously, a perpetual pealing that is irritating and unexplainable. The first very scary scene occurs during the evening, when they opt to walk around and they can’t find the ocean. There’s sand, there is the odor of rotting fish and salt, surf is audible, but the ocean appears spectral, or something else and even more alarming. It is simply profoundly ominous and every time I go to the shore after dark I recall this narrative that ruined the beach in the evening for me – positively.

The young couple – she’s very young, the man is mature – head back to the inn and discover the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and mortality and youth encounters dance of death bedlam. It’s a chilling meditation about longing and decline, two bodies maturing in tandem as partners, the connection and aggression and tenderness in matrimony.

Not just the most frightening, but probably a top example of short stories available, and an individual preference. I encountered it in Spanish, in the initial publication of these tales to be published in Argentina several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into Zombie beside the swimming area in France in 2020. Although it was sunny I experienced a chill within me. I also felt the electricity of fascination. I was composing my latest book, and I had hit a wall. I was uncertain if it was possible a proper method to write various frightening aspects the book contains. Going through this book, I understood that there was a way.

Released decades ago, the novel is a bleak exploration within the psyche of a young serial killer, Quentin P, based on a notorious figure, the criminal who killed and mutilated 17 young men and boys in a city during a specific period. Infamously, this person was consumed with producing a submissive individual who would stay with him and attempted numerous horrific efforts to do so.

The actions the book depicts are horrific, but equally frightening is the psychological persuasiveness. The character’s awful, fragmented world is directly described using minimal words, details omitted. You is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, obliged to witness ideas and deeds that shock. The foreignness of his psyche feels like a tangible impact – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Starting Zombie is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching from a gifted writer

During my youth, I walked in my sleep and later started having night terrors. Once, the horror involved a dream where I was confined inside a container and, as I roused, I discovered that I had ripped a part out of the window frame, attempting to escape. That building was decaying; when it rained heavily the ground floor corridor became inundated, maggots fell from the ceiling on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a sizeable vermin climbed the drapes in the bedroom.

After an acquaintance presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living in my childhood residence, but the story of the house located on the coastline felt familiar in my view, nostalgic as I felt. It is a novel featuring a possessed loud, sentimental building and a young woman who ingests calcium off the rocks. I adored the book deeply and returned again and again to its pages, consistently uncovering {something