Scary Novelists Discuss the Most Terrifying Tales They've Actually Experienced

A Renowned Horror Author

A Chilling Tale by a master of suspense

I discovered this story years ago and it has lingered with me ever since. The named “summer people” are the Allisons from New York, who lease an identical isolated country cottage each year. During this visit, in place of going back to the city, they opt to lengthen their vacation an extra month – an action that appears to unsettle each resident in the adjacent village. Each repeats a similar vague warning that no one has lingered in the area beyond the end of summer. Nonetheless, the Allisons are determined to not leave, and at that point events begin to become stranger. The man who supplies fuel declines to provide to the couple. Not a single person is willing to supply groceries to the cabin, and when they attempt to travel to the community, the automobile fails to start. A storm gathers, the power of their radio fade, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people clung to each other inside their cabin and anticipated”. What could be the Allisons anticipating? What might the townspeople be aware of? Every time I revisit the writer’s unnerving and inspiring tale, I recall that the best horror comes from what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by a noted author

In this concise narrative a pair travel to a typical coastal village where bells ring constantly, a constant chiming that is annoying and unexplainable. The initial truly frightening scene takes place during the evening, when they opt to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the water. Sand is present, there’s the smell of rotting fish and brine, waves crash, but the ocean appears spectral, or another thing and even more alarming. It is truly insanely sinister and each occasion I travel to the shore in the evening I remember this tale that destroyed the ocean after dark in my view – favorably.

The newlyweds – she’s very young, the husband is older – go back to their lodging and learn the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden meets dance of death bedlam. It’s an unnerving contemplation on desire and deterioration, a pair of individuals growing old jointly as partners, the attachment and violence and affection within wedlock.

Not only the scariest, but probably one of the best short stories in existence, and an individual preference. I experienced it in Spanish, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to be released in this country in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer

I perused this book beside the swimming area in the French countryside a few years ago. Although it was sunny I sensed a chill within me. I also felt the electricity of fascination. I was working on my third novel, and I had hit a wall. I wasn’t sure whether there existed any good way to compose various frightening aspects the book contains. Reading Zombie, I understood that it was possible.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a grim journey through the mind of a criminal, the main character, modeled after a notorious figure, the murderer who slaughtered and mutilated multiple victims in a city during a specific period. Infamously, this person was obsessed with producing a compliant victim who would stay by his side and attempted numerous horrific efforts to do so.

The actions the novel describes are appalling, but similarly terrifying is its mental realism. The character’s dreadful, broken reality is directly described using minimal words, identities hidden. You is plunged stuck in his mind, compelled to witness mental processes and behaviors that shock. The alien nature of his psyche feels like a bodily jolt – or getting lost on a desolate planet. Going into Zombie feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I walked in my sleep and later started having night terrors. On one occasion, the horror involved a vision during which I was stuck within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had ripped a piece off the window, seeking to leave. That home was falling apart; during heavy rain the downstairs hall flooded, maggots came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and once a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

Once a companion presented me with this author’s book, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the narrative of the house high on the Dover cliffs appeared known in my view, homesick at that time. This is a story featuring a possessed noisy, sentimental building and a girl who ingests chalk from the cliffs. I cherished the story deeply and went back again and again to it, each time discovering {something

Bonnie Hall
Bonnie Hall

A tech journalist and AI researcher passionate about demystifying complex technologies for everyday users.

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