Frightening Novelists Reveal the Most Terrifying Narratives They have Ever Read
Andrew Michael Hurley
A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson
I read this narrative years ago and it has stayed with me from that moment. The titular seasonal visitors are a couple from the city, who lease a particular off-grid country cottage annually. During this visit, instead of returning to the city, they decide to extend their stay a few more weeks – a decision that to unsettle everyone in the surrounding community. All pass on the same veiled caution that no one has ever stayed by the water past Labor Day. Nonetheless, the Allisons insist to not leave, and at that point events begin to grow more bizarre. The man who delivers the kerosene declines to provide for them. No one is willing to supply groceries to their home, and as the Allisons attempt to travel to the community, the automobile refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the batteries of their radio diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple clung to each other within their rental and anticipated”. What could be the Allisons waiting for? What do the townspeople know? Whenever I read the writer’s disturbing and thought-provoking narrative, I’m reminded that the top terror originates in that which remains hidden.
An Acclaimed Writer
An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman
In this brief tale a pair travel to a common beach community where bells ring continuously, a constant chiming that is annoying and unexplainable. The initial extremely terrifying episode happens during the evening, at the time they decide to take a walk and they can’t find the water. The beach is there, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and seawater, surf is audible, but the sea appears spectral, or something else and more dreadful. It’s just insanely sinister and each occasion I travel to the shore in the evening I recall this story which spoiled the sea at night for me – in a good way.
The recent spouses – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – go back to the inn and learn why the bells ring, in a long sequence of confinement, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth intersects with grim ballet bedlam. It’s an unnerving meditation on desire and decline, two bodies aging together as spouses, the attachment and violence and gentleness within wedlock.
Not just the scariest, but perhaps among the finest short stories out there, and a beloved choice. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of these tales to appear locally a decade ago.
A Prominent Novelist
Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates
I perused this book near the water in France in 2020. Even with the bright weather I felt an icy feeling through me. I also experienced the electricity of anticipation. I was working on my latest book, and I faced a block. I was uncertain if it was possible any good way to compose various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Going through this book, I understood that it could be done.
First printed in the nineties, the novel is a grim journey into the thoughts of a murderer, the protagonist, based on a notorious figure, the murderer who murdered and mutilated multiple victims in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, Dahmer was consumed with making a zombie sex slave who would never leave with him and attempted numerous macabre trials to accomplish it.
The deeds the novel describes are appalling, but equally frightening is the psychological persuasiveness. The protagonist’s terrible, broken reality is directly described in spare prose, names redacted. You is plunged caught in his thoughts, compelled to observe ideas and deeds that appal. The alien nature of his psyche resembles a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated on a desolate planet. Entering this book feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.
Daisy Johnson
White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi
When I was a child, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the horror involved a dream during which I was confined inside a container and, as I roused, I found that I had torn off a piece out of the window frame, trying to get out. That house was decaying; when storms came the ground floor corridor flooded, insect eggs dropped from above into the bedroom, and at one time a big rodent ascended the window coverings in the bedroom.
Once a companion handed me this author’s book, I was no longer living in my childhood residence, but the story about the home high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to me, homesick as I felt. It is a book featuring a possessed clamorous, atmospheric home and a young woman who eats limestone off the rocks. I cherished the book deeply and came back repeatedly to the story, consistently uncovering {something
