Frightening Novelists Reveal the Most Frightening Stories They've Ever Read
Andrew Michael Hurley
A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson
I encountered this tale long ago and it has stayed with me from that moment. The so-called vacationers are a couple from New York, who occupy a particular remote lakeside house every summer. During this visit, in place of going back to the city, they choose to extend their vacation a few more weeks – a decision that to unsettle all the locals in the surrounding community. All pass on an identical cryptic advice that no one has ever stayed in the area past the holiday. Nonetheless, the Allisons insist to stay, and that’s when events begin to grow more bizarre. The man who supplies oil won’t sell to the couple. No one will deliver food to the cabin, and at the time the Allisons try to drive into town, the car fails to start. Bad weather approaches, the energy of their radio diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people clung to each other inside their cabin and expected”. What are the Allisons anticipating? What do the residents know? Whenever I read the writer’s disturbing and thought-provoking tale, I recall that the finest fright comes from that which remains hidden.
An Acclaimed Writer
Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman
In this brief tale two people go to an ordinary seaside town in which chimes sound the whole time, a constant chiming that is irritating and inexplicable. The initial truly frightening episode takes place during the evening, as they choose to take a walk and they are unable to locate the sea. Sand is present, the scent exists of rotting fish and salt, surf is audible, but the sea is a ghost, or another thing and more dreadful. It’s just profoundly ominous and every time I travel to a beach in the evening I remember this tale that ruined the ocean after dark to my mind – favorably.
The newlyweds – the wife is youthful, the husband is older – go back to the hotel and discover the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden meets dance of death bedlam. It’s an unnerving meditation regarding craving and deterioration, two people aging together as a couple, the attachment and brutality and tenderness within wedlock.
Not merely the most terrifying, but probably one of the best brief tales in existence, and a personal favourite. I encountered it en español, in the initial publication of this author’s works to appear in this country a decade ago.
Catriona Ward
Zombie by an esteemed writer
I read this narrative near the water in the French countryside recently. Although it was sunny I experienced an icy feeling through me. Additionally, I sensed the excitement of excitement. I was composing my latest book, and I had hit a block. I wasn’t sure if it was possible any good way to craft some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Going through this book, I saw that there was a way.
First printed in the nineties, the story is a bleak exploration into the thoughts of a young serial killer, the protagonist, based on an infamous individual, the serial killer who killed and cut apart numerous individuals in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, the killer was obsessed with making a zombie sex slave that would remain him and attempted numerous horrific efforts to achieve this.
The acts the book depicts are appalling, but just as scary is the emotional authenticity. The character’s awful, broken reality is directly described using minimal words, details omitted. The audience is immersed stuck in his mind, obliged to see thoughts and actions that shock. The foreignness of his mind feels like a tangible impact – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Entering Zombie is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.
Daisy Johnson
White Is for Witching from a gifted writer
In my early years, I was a somnambulist and subsequently commenced having night terrors. On one occasion, the horror involved a vision where I was stuck in a box and, when I woke up, I found that I had removed the slat off the window, seeking to leave. That building was falling apart; when it rained heavily the entranceway filled with water, fly larvae came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in the bedroom.
Once a companion gave me this author’s book, I was residing elsewhere in my childhood residence, but the narrative regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to me, homesick as I felt. It is a story featuring a possessed clamorous, emotional house and a female character who ingests chalk off the rocks. I loved the novel immensely and came back repeatedly to its pages, always finding {something
