Frightening Writers Share the Most Frightening Narratives They have Actually Encountered
A Renowned Horror Author
A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson
I discovered this story some time back and it has lingered with me from that moment. The so-called vacationers happen to be a couple from the city, who lease the same off-grid rural cabin each year. During this visit, in place of going back home, they decide to extend their stay for a month longer – a decision that to alarm each resident in the surrounding community. Everyone conveys the same veiled caution that no one has ever stayed at the lake beyond the end of summer. Regardless, the couple insist to remain, and that’s when events begin to become stranger. The person who brings the kerosene refuses to sell to the couple. No one agrees to bring groceries to their home, and when the Allisons attempt to travel to the community, the car won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the energy within the device die, and when night comes, “the two old people crowded closely inside their cabin and waited”. What could be this couple waiting for? What do the townspeople be aware of? Whenever I peruse the writer’s unnerving and influential story, I remember that the best horror originates in what’s left undisclosed.
An Acclaimed Writer
An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman
In this short story a couple travel to an ordinary beach community where church bells toll continuously, an incessant ringing that is irritating and unexplainable. The first very scary scene takes place at night, at the time they choose to go for a stroll and they can’t find the ocean. The beach is there, the scent exists of rotting fish and brine, there are waves, but the sea seems phantom, or another thing and even more alarming. It is simply deeply malevolent and every time I go to the coast at night I think about this tale that destroyed the beach in the evening for me – favorably.
The recent spouses – she’s very young, the husband is older – return to their lodging and discover the cause of the ringing, during a prolonged scene of enclosed spaces, necro-orgy and demise and innocence intersects with danse macabre chaos. It’s a chilling meditation about longing and decay, two bodies growing old jointly as partners, the bond and aggression and tenderness in matrimony.
Not just the most terrifying, but perhaps one of the best brief tales available, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to appear in this country in 2011.
A Prominent Novelist
A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer
I perused Zombie by a pool in France recently. Despite the sunshine I sensed cold creep through me. Additionally, I sensed the electricity of anticipation. I was working on a new project, and I encountered an obstacle. I wasn’t sure if it was possible any good way to craft some of the fearful things the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I realized that there was a way.
Released decades ago, the novel is a dark flight within the psyche of a young serial killer, the protagonist, modeled after a notorious figure, the criminal who slaughtered and cut apart numerous individuals in a city over a decade. Notoriously, Dahmer was consumed with creating a compliant victim that would remain by his side and carried out several horrific efforts to do so.
The actions the story tells are horrific, but similarly terrifying is its emotional authenticity. The character’s terrible, shattered existence is simply narrated with concise language, identities hidden. The reader is sunk deep stuck in his mind, compelled to witness mental processes and behaviors that appal. The strangeness of his thinking resembles a tangible impact – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Starting Zombie feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are consumed entirely.
Daisy Johnson
White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi
During my youth, I walked in my sleep and eventually began having night terrors. At one point, the terror included a dream in which I was trapped within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I found that I had removed the slat off the window, attempting to escape. That house was decaying; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall filled with water, insect eggs came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and once a big rodent climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.
When a friend presented me with this author’s book, I was residing elsewhere in my childhood residence, but the story regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs appeared known to myself, homesick as I was. It’s a book featuring a possessed loud, sentimental building and a female character who eats calcium off the rocks. I adored the story so much and came back frequently to its pages, always finding {something
