Frightening Authors Reveal the Scariest Tales They've Actually Encountered

A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People from a master of suspense

I encountered this story some time back and it has lingered with me from that moment. The named “summer people” are the Allisons from the city, who lease an identical isolated country cottage every summer. On this occasion, rather than heading back to the city, they decide to extend their stay an extra month – something that seems to disturb everyone in the surrounding community. All pass on the same veiled caution that not a soul has ever stayed at the lake after the holiday. Nonetheless, they are resolved to stay, and at that point events begin to get increasingly weird. The individual who supplies the kerosene won’t sell for them. No one agrees to bring supplies to the cabin, and at the time the family endeavor to drive into town, the automobile refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the batteries in the radio fade, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple crowded closely within their rental and expected”. What could be they waiting for? What could the townspeople be aware of? Whenever I peruse the writer’s disturbing and influential tale, I’m reminded that the best horror stems from what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a pair travel to a common seaside town in which chimes sound continuously, a constant chiming that is irritating and puzzling. The first very scary scene takes place during the evening, as they opt to walk around and they can’t find the sea. Sand is present, there is the odor of decaying seafood and brine, waves crash, but the water appears spectral, or another thing and more dreadful. It’s just profoundly ominous and each occasion I visit to a beach after dark I remember this story which spoiled the sea at night in my view – favorably.

The young couple – she’s very young, the man is mature – return to the hotel and learn the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden encounters dance of death chaos. It is a disturbing reflection about longing and decay, two bodies aging together as a couple, the bond and brutality and tenderness within wedlock.

Not merely the most frightening, but likely among the finest short stories available, and an individual preference. I read it en español, in the initial publication of these tales to appear in Argentina several years back.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this book near the water overseas in 2020. Even with the bright weather I experienced an icy feeling within me. I also felt the electricity of anticipation. I was writing my third novel, and I had hit an obstacle. I didn’t know if there was a proper method to write some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Going through this book, I saw that it could be done.

Released decades ago, the story is a grim journey within the psyche of a young serial killer, the protagonist, inspired by a notorious figure, the criminal who killed and mutilated 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee during a specific period. As is well-known, this person was obsessed with creating a submissive individual that would remain with him and made many macabre trials to achieve this.

The actions the book depicts are terrible, but similarly terrifying is its emotional authenticity. The character’s awful, fragmented world is directly described in spare prose, details omitted. The reader is plunged trapped in his consciousness, obliged to see mental processes and behaviors that appal. The alien nature of his thinking resembles a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Starting this book is less like reading but a complete immersion. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from a gifted writer

During my youth, I sleepwalked and later started suffering from bad dreams. Once, the terror included a dream where I was confined within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I realized that I had removed a piece from the window, attempting to escape. That house was decaying; during heavy rain the ground floor corridor filled with water, insect eggs dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and at one time a sizeable vermin climbed the drapes in the bedroom.

After an acquaintance gave me this author’s book, I was residing elsewhere in my childhood residence, but the story regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to me, homesick as I was. This is a book featuring a possessed noisy, emotional house and a female character who ingests limestone from the shoreline. I loved the novel deeply and came back frequently to the story, consistently uncovering {something