Frightening Writers Discuss the Most Frightening Stories They've Ever Read
Andrew Michael Hurley
A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson
I discovered this narrative long ago and it has lingered with me since then. The so-called “summer people” are a family urban dwellers, who lease a particular remote rural cabin annually. On this occasion, instead of heading back to urban life, they choose to extend their stay a few more weeks – an action that appears to disturb everyone in the surrounding community. Everyone conveys the same veiled caution that nobody has remained in the area past the end of summer. Even so, they are resolved to not leave, and that’s when things start to get increasingly weird. The man who delivers oil refuses to sell to the couple. Not a single person agrees to bring groceries to the cabin, and when the Allisons endeavor to go to the village, their vehicle won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the energy of their radio fade, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals huddled together in their summer cottage and waited”. What are they expecting? What might the locals know? Each occasion I peruse Jackson’s chilling and inspiring story, I recall that the best horror stems from what’s left undisclosed.
Mariana Enríquez
An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman
In this short story a couple journey to a common coastal village where church bells toll continuously, an incessant ringing that is annoying and unexplainable. The first truly frightening moment occurs after dark, as they opt to go for a stroll and they can’t find the water. There’s sand, there is the odor of rotting fish and seawater, waves crash, but the water is a ghost, or something else and even more alarming. It is truly insanely sinister and each occasion I visit to the coast at night I recall this story which spoiled the ocean after dark to my mind – favorably.
The newlyweds – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – return to the hotel and learn the cause of the ringing, during a prolonged scene of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and mortality and youth encounters danse macabre chaos. It is a disturbing contemplation about longing and decay, a pair of individuals growing old jointly as spouses, the attachment and brutality and affection of marriage.
Not merely the most terrifying, but probably among the finest short stories out there, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in Spanish, in the initial publication of this author’s works to be published locally in 2011.
A Prominent Novelist
A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer
I perused this book near the water overseas recently. Despite the sunshine I felt cold creep within me. I also felt the excitement of anticipation. I was composing a new project, and I faced an obstacle. I wasn’t sure if it was possible an effective approach to craft certain terrifying elements the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I saw that there was a way.
First printed in the nineties, the book is a grim journey within the psyche of a young serial killer, the main character, modeled after an infamous individual, the criminal who slaughtered and mutilated numerous individuals in Milwaukee during a specific period. Notoriously, Dahmer was fixated with making a zombie sex slave who would never leave with him and made many grisly attempts to accomplish it.
The actions the book depicts are appalling, but just as scary is its emotional authenticity. Quentin P’s terrible, fragmented world is plainly told with concise language, details omitted. The audience is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, compelled to see ideas and deeds that shock. The strangeness of his thinking is like a bodily jolt – or getting lost on a desolate planet. Entering this book is less like reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.
An Accomplished Author
White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi
In my early years, I was a somnambulist and subsequently commenced suffering from bad dreams. Once, the horror involved a dream in which I was stuck in a box and, as I roused, I discovered that I had removed a piece out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That house was decaying; when storms came the downstairs hall became inundated, maggots dropped from above onto the bed, and once a large rat climbed the drapes in that space.
When a friend gave me the story, I was residing elsewhere in my childhood residence, but the tale regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar in my view, homesick as I felt. This is a story featuring a possessed clamorous, emotional house and a female character who eats limestone off the rocks. I loved the book immensely and came back frequently to the story, each time discovering {something