Scary Novelists Share the Scariest Stories They've Actually Read
Andrew Michael Hurley
The Summer People from Shirley Jackson
I read this narrative years ago and it has lingered with me ever since. The so-called vacationers happen to be a family urban dwellers, who lease the same off-grid lakeside house annually. On this occasion, in place of going back home, they opt to extend their vacation an extra month – an action that appears to unsettle each resident in the adjacent village. All pass on an identical cryptic advice that nobody has lingered in the area beyond Labor Day. Regardless, the couple are determined to not leave, and at that point things start to get increasingly weird. The man who delivers the kerosene won’t sell to them. Nobody will deliver supplies to their home, and as the family try to go to the village, their vehicle refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the energy within the device fade, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple clung to each other in their summer cottage and expected”. What could be they waiting for? What could the locals understand? Each occasion I read this author’s unnerving and influential story, I remember that the top terror comes from what’s left undisclosed.
An Acclaimed Writer
An Eerie Story from a noted author
In this brief tale a couple journey to a typical beach community where church bells toll constantly, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and puzzling. The first truly frightening episode happens after dark, when they opt to take a walk and they fail to see the ocean. The beach is there, there is the odor of putrid marine life and brine, surf is audible, but the sea is a ghost, or another thing and worse. It is truly insanely sinister and whenever I go to the coast after dark I recall this story that destroyed the beach in the evening to my mind – favorably.
The recent spouses – the wife is youthful, the husband is older – head back to the hotel and learn the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of confinement, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth intersects with danse macabre pandemonium. It’s an unnerving contemplation about longing and deterioration, two bodies aging together as partners, the attachment and violence and gentleness of marriage.
Not just the most terrifying, but likely a top example of concise narratives out there, and a personal favourite. I read it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of these tales to be released in Argentina in 2011.
A Prominent Novelist
Zombie by an esteemed writer
I read this book near the water in the French countryside in 2020. Even with the bright weather I sensed an icy feeling through me. I also experienced the thrill of fascination. I was composing my third novel, and I encountered a wall. I was uncertain if it was possible an effective approach to craft various frightening aspects the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I realized that it could be done.
Released decades ago, the story is a dark flight through the mind of a criminal, the protagonist, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who slaughtered and cut apart multiple victims in Milwaukee over a decade. Notoriously, Dahmer was obsessed with making a submissive individual that would remain by his side and attempted numerous macabre trials to do so.
The acts the novel describes are horrific, but similarly terrifying is its own emotional authenticity. The character’s dreadful, broken reality is plainly told with concise language, names redacted. You is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, obliged to see ideas and deeds that horrify. The strangeness of his mind resembles a physical shock – or getting lost in an empty realm. Entering this book is not just reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.
An Accomplished Author
A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi
During my youth, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced experiencing nightmares. Once, the terror included a nightmare where I was confined in a box and, upon awakening, I found that I had ripped a piece off the window, trying to get out. That home was crumbling; when storms came the ground floor corridor became inundated, maggots dropped from above into the bedroom, and at one time a big rodent scaled the curtains in the bedroom.
Once a companion gave me this author’s book, I had moved out at my family home, but the story regarding the building perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable to myself, nostalgic as I felt. This is a novel about a haunted loud, atmospheric home and a girl who ingests chalk off the rocks. I cherished the book deeply and went back again and again to its pages, each time discovering {something
