Horror Novelists Share the Most Frightening Narratives They've Ever Experienced
Andrew Michael Hurley
A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson
I discovered this tale long ago and it has stayed with me ever since. The titular “summer people” happen to be the Allisons urban dwellers, who lease the same remote country cottage every summer. During this visit, rather than returning to urban life, they choose to extend their stay a few more weeks – a decision that to alarm everyone in the nearby town. Each repeats an identical cryptic advice that no one has ever stayed at the lake beyond the holiday. Nonetheless, the Allisons insist to remain, and at that point events begin to grow more bizarre. The person who brings oil refuses to sell for them. Not a single person is willing to supply groceries to the cottage, and when the Allisons try to go to the village, their vehicle refuses to operate. A storm gathers, the batteries within the device die, and when night comes, “the aged individuals huddled together inside their cabin and expected”. What might be this couple waiting for? What do the locals understand? Whenever I peruse this author’s disturbing and influential story, I remember that the top terror comes from that which remains hidden.
An Acclaimed Writer
An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman
In this short story a couple journey to an ordinary coastal village where bells ring the whole time, an incessant ringing that is annoying and puzzling. The initial very scary moment takes place after dark, when they choose to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the sea. The beach is there, there is the odor of putrid marine life and brine, waves crash, but the sea is a ghost, or something else and worse. It’s just profoundly ominous and whenever I visit to the coast in the evening I think about this tale that ruined the sea at night in my view – favorably.
The recent spouses – she’s very young, the husband is older – go back to the hotel and learn why the bells ring, in a long sequence of confinement, necro-orgy and mortality and youth meets dance of death bedlam. It is a disturbing reflection on desire and decay, two people aging together as partners, the connection and violence and tenderness of marriage.
Not merely the most terrifying, but probably a top example of concise narratives out there, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in Spanish, in the debut release of these tales to appear in Argentina a decade ago.
A Prominent Novelist
Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates
I perused this book near the water in France a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I experienced an icy feeling over me. Additionally, I sensed the thrill of anticipation. I was writing my latest book, and I encountered an obstacle. I was uncertain if it was possible any good way to write various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Going through this book, I understood that it was possible.
Released decades ago, the book is a grim journey through the mind of a young serial killer, the protagonist, inspired by a notorious figure, the murderer who murdered and dismembered numerous individuals in the Midwest over a decade. Notoriously, this person was consumed with creating a zombie sex slave that would remain him and made many horrific efforts to accomplish it.
The actions the book depicts are terrible, but equally frightening is the mental realism. Quentin P’s terrible, fragmented world is simply narrated with concise language, details omitted. The audience is immersed caught in his thoughts, forced to observe mental processes and behaviors that shock. The foreignness of his mind is like a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Starting this story is not just reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.
Daisy Johnson
A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi
During my youth, I walked in my sleep and later started experiencing nightmares. On one occasion, the horror involved a vision in which I was stuck inside a container and, when I woke up, I found that I had ripped a part out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That house was decaying; during heavy rain the downstairs hall became inundated, maggots dropped from above onto the bed, and at one time a big rodent climbed the drapes in the bedroom.
Once a companion gave me this author’s book, I had moved out at my family home, but the narrative of the house perched on the cliffs felt familiar to myself, longing as I felt. It’s a book concerning a ghostly noisy, sentimental building and a girl who eats chalk from the shoreline. I loved the novel so much and came back repeatedly to it, always finding {something
