Frightening Authors Share the Most Terrifying Tales They've Actually Encountered

A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I read this narrative long ago and it has lingered with me ever since. The named vacationers are a couple from the city, who rent a particular off-grid rural cabin every summer. During this visit, instead of returning to urban life, they choose to prolong their holiday an extra month – something that seems to disturb each resident in the nearby town. All pass on the same veiled caution that not a soul has ever stayed in the area past the holiday. Regardless, they insist to stay, and that’s when situations commence to become stranger. The person who brings oil refuses to sell to them. No one will deliver food to the cottage, and as they attempt to drive into town, the car refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the energy within the device diminish, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple clung to each other within their rental and expected”. What might be they anticipating? What do the residents be aware of? Each occasion I revisit the writer’s unnerving and inspiring tale, I’m reminded that the top terror comes from what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a pair travel to an ordinary seaside town where church bells toll continuously, an incessant ringing that is annoying and unexplainable. The first extremely terrifying episode occurs during the evening, at the time they opt to take a walk and they are unable to locate the ocean. Sand is present, there is the odor of decaying seafood and salt, there are waves, but the ocean appears spectral, or another thing and worse. It’s just deeply malevolent and every time I go to the shore at night I recall this tale that ruined the ocean after dark for me – in a good way.

The newlyweds – the woman is adolescent, he’s not – return to the inn and find out the reason for the chiming, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and mortality and youth encounters dance of death bedlam. It’s an unnerving meditation on desire and deterioration, two bodies aging together as a couple, the attachment and aggression and gentleness in matrimony.

Not just the most terrifying, but perhaps one of the best short stories out there, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in Spanish, in the first edition of Aickman stories to appear in this country in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I read this book by a pool in the French countryside in 2020. Although it was sunny I felt an icy feeling over me. I also felt the excitement of excitement. I was composing a new project, and I faced an obstacle. I didn’t know if there was an effective approach to write certain terrifying elements the story includes. Reading Zombie, I saw that it could be done.

Published in 1995, the story is a grim journey within the psyche of a murderer, Quentin P, modeled after a notorious figure, the criminal who killed and mutilated 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee over a decade. Infamously, the killer was obsessed with producing a submissive individual who would never leave by his side and attempted numerous grisly attempts to achieve this.

The acts the novel describes are terrible, but equally frightening is the psychological persuasiveness. The protagonist’s awful, broken reality is directly described with concise language, identities hidden. The audience is sunk deep stuck in his mind, forced to observe thoughts and actions that horrify. The foreignness of his mind resembles a tangible impact – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Going into this book is less like reading but a complete immersion. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and later started having night terrors. At one point, the terror involved a vision during which I was confined within an enclosure and, as I roused, I found that I had ripped the slat from the window, seeking to leave. That house was decaying; during heavy rain the entranceway became inundated, fly larvae came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and once a large rat climbed the drapes in that space.

When a friend gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere in my childhood residence, but the story about the home perched on the cliffs felt familiar in my view, longing at that time. This is a novel featuring a possessed clamorous, atmospheric home and a young woman who eats calcium from the cliffs. I cherished the story so much and returned repeatedly to the story, always finding {something