Horror Novelists Share the Most Frightening Narratives They have Actually Read
A Renowned Horror Author
A Chilling Tale by a master of suspense
I encountered this tale long ago and it has lingered with me since then. The titular seasonal visitors turn out to be a family urban dwellers, who rent an identical isolated lakeside house annually. This time, rather than heading back home, they decide to prolong their stay for a month longer – a decision that to unsettle each resident in the adjacent village. Each repeats an identical cryptic advice that nobody has remained at the lake beyond the holiday. Even so, the Allisons are resolved to remain, and at that point situations commence to grow more bizarre. The person who brings fuel refuses to sell for them. Nobody agrees to bring food to the cabin, and at the time the family endeavor to go to the village, their vehicle refuses to operate. A storm gathers, the power in the radio die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the aged individuals clung to each other inside their cabin and waited”. What could be this couple anticipating? What might the locals understand? Whenever I peruse this author’s disturbing and influential tale, I’m reminded that the top terror comes from the unspoken.
An Acclaimed Writer
An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman
In this brief tale two people travel to a typical seaside town where church bells toll continuously, a constant chiming that is irritating and puzzling. The first truly frightening moment happens after dark, when they decide to take a walk and they fail to see the water. There’s sand, there is the odor of rotting fish and brine, waves crash, but the water is a ghost, or another thing and worse. It is simply deeply malevolent and every time I visit to the shore at night I think about this tale that ruined the beach in the evening in my view – favorably.
The young couple – she’s very young, the husband is older – return to the inn and find out why the bells ring, during a prolonged scene of confinement, necro-orgy and death-and-the-maiden intersects with danse macabre bedlam. It is a disturbing reflection about longing and decay, two people aging together as spouses, the bond and violence and gentleness of marriage.
Not just the scariest, but probably one of the best short stories out there, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of Aickman stories to be released in this country several years back.
A Prominent Novelist
A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates
I read this book by a pool in the French countryside in 2020. Even with the bright weather I felt a chill through me. Additionally, I sensed the electricity of excitement. I was writing my latest book, and I faced a wall. I was uncertain whether there existed any good way to compose some of the fearful things the story includes. Reading Zombie, I saw that it was possible.
Published in 1995, the novel is a dark flight into the thoughts of a criminal, the main character, inspired by a notorious figure, the murderer who killed and mutilated multiple victims in a city over a decade. Infamously, Dahmer was fixated with producing a compliant victim who would never leave by his side and made many macabre trials to achieve this.
The acts the novel describes are terrible, but equally frightening is its own emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s dreadful, shattered existence is simply narrated with concise language, identities hidden. You is plunged trapped in his consciousness, compelled to see thoughts and actions that shock. The foreignness of his psyche is like a tangible impact – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Entering Zombie is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.
Daisy Johnson
White Is for Witching from a gifted writer
When I was a child, I sleepwalked and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the fear featured a nightmare in which I was stuck in a box and, upon awakening, I realized that I had ripped a piece from the window, seeking to leave. That building was decaying; when storms came the entranceway filled with water, fly larvae dropped from above into the bedroom, and on one occasion a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in my sister’s room.
After an acquaintance handed me the story, I had moved out at my family home, but the tale regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to me, homesick as I was. It is a novel featuring a possessed loud, atmospheric home and a female character who eats limestone from the shoreline. I loved the story immensely and returned frequently to its pages, each time discovering {something
