Horror Writers Share the Scariest Narratives They've Actually Encountered

Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I discovered this story some time back and it has lingered with me since then. The so-called seasonal visitors are the Allisons from New York, who occupy a particular off-grid rural cabin every summer. On this occasion, in place of going back to the city, they decide to lengthen their vacation an extra month – something that seems to unsettle each resident in the nearby town. All pass on a similar vague warning that nobody has ever stayed at the lake after the end of summer. Even so, the Allisons are resolved to stay, and that’s when events begin to grow more bizarre. The individual who supplies oil refuses to sell to the couple. Not a single person will deliver food to their home, and as they try to travel to the community, the car refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the power within the device diminish, and when night comes, “the two old people crowded closely in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What are this couple waiting for? What could the residents be aware of? Whenever I revisit this author’s disturbing and thought-provoking story, I recall that the finest fright stems from that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman

In this short story two people journey to a common coastal village where bells ring continuously, an incessant ringing that is annoying and inexplicable. The opening truly frightening episode takes place after dark, at the time they decide to take a walk and they fail to see the ocean. Sand is present, the scent exists of rotting fish and seawater, surf is audible, but the sea seems phantom, or something else and worse. It is truly profoundly ominous and whenever I visit to the shore at night I recall this narrative which spoiled the sea at night to my mind – favorably.

The recent spouses – she’s very young, the man is mature – return to the inn and discover the cause of the ringing, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and mortality and youth meets dance of death pandemonium. It is a disturbing reflection regarding craving and decay, a pair of individuals aging together as spouses, the attachment and brutality and tenderness within wedlock.

Not only the most frightening, but probably among the finest concise narratives available, and a beloved choice. I read it in Spanish, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to be published in this country a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into Zombie near the water in the French countryside in 2020. Despite the sunshine I sensed a chill over me. I also experienced the excitement of fascination. I was composing my latest book, and I encountered a block. I was uncertain if there was any good way to craft various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I saw that it could be done.

Released decades ago, the novel is a dark flight into the thoughts of a murderer, the protagonist, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who murdered and mutilated 17 young men and boys in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, the killer was obsessed with creating a zombie sex slave who would never leave by his side and made many grisly attempts to do so.

The acts the novel describes are horrific, but equally frightening is its emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s terrible, shattered existence is simply narrated using minimal words, details omitted. The audience is sunk deep stuck in his mind, compelled to see thoughts and actions that shock. The strangeness of his thinking is like a bodily jolt – or getting lost on a desolate planet. Entering Zombie feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from a gifted writer

When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and later started having night terrors. On one occasion, the terror featured a dream during which I was trapped in a box and, upon awakening, I found that I had torn off a part out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That house was crumbling; during heavy rain the downstairs hall flooded, insect eggs fell from the ceiling onto the bed, and once a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in that space.

Once a companion presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living at my family home, but the narrative of the house high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to myself, nostalgic as I felt. It is a book featuring a possessed loud, sentimental building and a female character who consumes calcium from the cliffs. I adored the story immensely and went back again and again to its pages, always finding {something