Horror Writers Share the Most Terrifying Stories They have Actually Read
A Renowned Horror Author
A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson
I discovered this story years ago and it has stayed with me from that moment. The so-called vacationers are a couple urban dwellers, who occupy a particular isolated lakeside house every summer. On this occasion, rather than going back home, they opt to extend their holiday for a month longer – a decision that to unsettle each resident in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that nobody has remained by the water beyond the end of summer. Nonetheless, the couple are determined to not leave, and that’s when things start to become stranger. The person who brings fuel won’t sell to the couple. Not a single person will deliver supplies to their home, and as the family endeavor to drive into town, the car won’t start. A storm gathers, the batteries in the radio fade, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people crowded closely within their rental and anticipated”. What are the Allisons expecting? What could the townspeople know? Every time I revisit this author’s unnerving and influential tale, I’m reminded that the top terror comes from that which remains hidden.
An Acclaimed Writer
An Eerie Story from a noted author
In this short story a couple journey to a common beach community in which chimes sound the whole time, an incessant ringing that is irritating and inexplicable. The first extremely terrifying scene occurs at night, when they decide to walk around and they fail to see the ocean. Sand is present, there is the odor of decaying seafood and brine, there are waves, but the water is a ghost, or something else and more dreadful. It’s just profoundly ominous and whenever I go to the coast in the evening I think about this story which spoiled the ocean after dark to my mind – favorably.
The young couple – she’s very young, the man is mature – head back to the hotel and learn the cause of the ringing, during a prolonged scene of confinement, macabre revelry and demise and innocence encounters grim ballet chaos. It’s a chilling meditation about longing and deterioration, two bodies maturing in tandem as partners, the connection and brutality and gentleness of marriage.
Not just the most terrifying, but likely a top example of concise narratives available, and an individual preference. I encountered it en español, in the debut release of this author’s works to appear locally a decade ago.
A Prominent Novelist
A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates
I read Zombie beside the swimming area overseas recently. Even with the bright weather I sensed an icy feeling through me. I also experienced the thrill of excitement. I was writing my latest book, and I encountered a block. I was uncertain if there was a proper method to write various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I realized that there was a way.
Published in 1995, the book is a grim journey into the thoughts of a murderer, the protagonist, modeled after a notorious figure, the criminal who killed and mutilated numerous individuals in a city between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, Dahmer was obsessed with creating a zombie sex slave who would never leave with him and carried out several horrific efforts to accomplish it.
The actions the book depicts are appalling, but just as scary is its emotional authenticity. Quentin P’s dreadful, broken reality is plainly told using minimal words, identities hidden. You is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, forced to see mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The strangeness of his mind is like a tangible impact – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Going into Zombie feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.
An Accomplished Author
A Haunting Novel from a gifted writer
When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and subsequently commenced experiencing nightmares. On one occasion, the fear featured a vision where I was trapped in a box and, when I woke up, I found that I had ripped a piece out of the window frame, trying to get out. That home was falling apart; when storms came the entranceway became inundated, maggots dropped from above onto the bed, and once a large rat scaled the curtains in my sister’s room.
After an acquaintance presented me with the story, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the story regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to me, nostalgic as I was. It’s a story concerning a ghostly clamorous, emotional house and a girl who consumes calcium off the rocks. I adored the novel deeply and returned frequently to it, consistently uncovering {something