Scary Writers Share the Most Frightening Stories They have Actually Experienced
Andrew Michael Hurley
The Summer People from Shirley Jackson
I discovered this tale some time back and it has haunted me from that moment. The named “summer people” turn out to be a family from New York, who lease the same isolated rural cabin every summer. During this visit, rather than returning to urban life, they decide to lengthen their holiday a few more weeks – something that seems to unsettle each resident in the adjacent village. Each repeats an identical cryptic advice that not a soul has ever stayed in the area after the end of summer. Nonetheless, they insist to not leave, and that’s when things start to grow more bizarre. The man who delivers the kerosene declines to provide for them. No one agrees to bring groceries to the cabin, and at the time the Allisons try to drive into town, their vehicle fails to start. Bad weather approaches, the batteries in the radio diminish, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals huddled together within their rental and anticipated”. What are this couple expecting? What might the townspeople be aware of? Whenever I peruse Jackson’s unnerving and influential story, I recall that the top terror stems from what’s left undisclosed.
An Acclaimed Writer
An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman
In this concise narrative a pair travel to a common coastal village in which chimes sound constantly, a constant chiming that is bothersome and inexplicable. The first extremely terrifying episode takes place during the evening, at the time they opt to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the water. Sand is present, the scent exists of decaying seafood and seawater, surf is audible, but the water appears spectral, or a different entity and even more alarming. It’s just profoundly ominous and every time I go to the coast after dark I think about this tale that ruined the sea at night to my mind – positively.
The young couple – the wife is youthful, he’s not – head back to their lodging and discover the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, necro-orgy and mortality and youth encounters dance of death pandemonium. It’s a chilling reflection on desire and deterioration, two bodies maturing in tandem as spouses, the attachment and aggression and tenderness in matrimony.
Not merely the scariest, but probably among the finest brief tales in existence, and a beloved choice. I read it en español, in the debut release of this author’s works to be published in Argentina several years back.
A Prominent Novelist
Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates
I read this narrative near the water in France recently. Although it was sunny I sensed cold creep within me. I also felt the excitement of anticipation. I was working on my third novel, and I faced an obstacle. I was uncertain whether there existed any good way to compose certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Experiencing this novel, I realized that it was possible.
First printed in the nineties, the story is a dark flight into the thoughts of a young serial killer, the main character, modeled after a notorious figure, the murderer who slaughtered and dismembered numerous individuals in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, the killer was consumed with creating a compliant victim that would remain with him and attempted numerous grisly attempts to do so.
The deeds the book depicts are horrific, but similarly terrifying is its own mental realism. The protagonist’s terrible, fragmented world is simply narrated in spare prose, details omitted. The audience is sunk deep stuck in his mind, compelled to see thoughts and actions that shock. The foreignness of his psyche resembles a bodily jolt – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Entering Zombie feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.
Daisy Johnson
White Is for Witching by a gifted writer
During my youth, I sleepwalked and later started having night terrors. On one occasion, the horror involved a dream in which I was confined in a box and, upon awakening, I discovered that I had ripped the slat out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That house was crumbling; during heavy rain the downstairs hall flooded, fly larvae fell from the ceiling on to my parents’ bed, and at one time a big rodent ascended the window coverings in that space.
When a friend handed me this author’s book, I was no longer living with my parents, but the narrative of the house perched on the cliffs felt familiar to me, longing as I was. It is a book featuring a possessed noisy, emotional house and a young woman who eats calcium off the rocks. I adored the book immensely and went back again and again to the story, always finding {something
