Scary Novelists Discuss the Scariest Stories They've Ever Encountered

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense

I discovered this story some time back and it has haunted me ever since. The named vacationers happen to be a couple from the city, who lease a particular isolated lakeside house annually. During this visit, rather than returning home, they decide to extend their stay an extra month – something that seems to disturb everyone in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that not a soul has lingered by the water past Labor Day. Even so, the Allisons are resolved to stay, and at that point things start to become stranger. The man who delivers fuel declines to provide to the couple. Nobody will deliver food to the cottage, and at the time they attempt to drive into town, the automobile refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the energy of their radio die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people huddled together in their summer cottage and expected”. What might be this couple waiting for? What could the townspeople understand? Whenever I read Jackson’s unnerving and influential narrative, I remember that the top terror comes from that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes from a noted author

In this short story a couple journey to an ordinary beach community in which chimes sound continuously, an incessant ringing that is annoying and puzzling. The opening extremely terrifying episode happens after dark, at the time they choose to go for a stroll and they can’t find the sea. Sand is present, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and salt, waves crash, but the sea is a ghost, or a different entity and worse. It is truly deeply malevolent and every time I go to a beach after dark I remember this story that destroyed the sea at night for me – positively.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, he’s not – return to the inn and find out the reason for the chiming, during a prolonged scene of enclosed spaces, necro-orgy and mortality and youth meets grim ballet bedlam. It’s a chilling reflection on desire and decay, two people growing old jointly as partners, the attachment and aggression and tenderness of marriage.

Not only the most frightening, but probably a top example of short stories out there, and a personal favourite. I experienced it en español, in the initial publication of this author’s works to appear in this country several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from an esteemed writer

I delved into this narrative by a pool overseas in 2020. Despite the sunshine I sensed cold creep through me. I also felt the thrill of fascination. I was composing my third novel, and I encountered a block. I was uncertain if there was an effective approach to write various frightening aspects the book contains. Going through this book, I understood that it was possible.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a dark flight through the mind of a young serial killer, Quentin P, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who murdered and dismembered multiple victims in a city over a decade. Notoriously, Dahmer was obsessed with making a compliant victim who would never leave him and carried out several grisly attempts to achieve this.

The actions the story tells are terrible, but just as scary is its own emotional authenticity. The character’s dreadful, fragmented world is directly described with concise language, identities hidden. The reader is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, obliged to observe thoughts and actions that appal. The foreignness of his psyche feels like a physical shock – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Entering this story feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel by a gifted writer

In my early years, I was a somnambulist and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the terror included a vision in which I was confined in a box and, upon awakening, I realized that I had removed a piece off the window, seeking to leave. That building was decaying; during heavy rain the entranceway became inundated, fly larvae dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and once a large rat climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.

Once a companion gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living at my family home, but the narrative of the house perched on the cliffs felt familiar to myself, homesick as I was. It’s a story featuring a possessed loud, atmospheric home and a female character who eats chalk off the rocks. I cherished the novel immensely and returned again and again to it, each time discovering {something