Horror Novelists Reveal the Scariest Narratives They have Ever Experienced
Andrew Michael Hurley
A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense
I encountered this story long ago and it has stayed with me since then. The so-called seasonal visitors turn out to be a family from New York, who occupy a particular remote lakeside house each year. This time, rather than going back home, they opt to extend their stay a few more weeks – a decision that to alarm all the locals in the nearby town. Each repeats a similar vague warning that no one has ever stayed by the water beyond the holiday. Nonetheless, the couple are determined to not leave, and that is the moment situations commence to grow more bizarre. The person who supplies oil declines to provide to them. No one agrees to bring supplies to the cabin, and at the time the Allisons attempt to travel to the community, the automobile won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the power within the device die, and when night comes, “the aged individuals clung to each other in their summer cottage and waited”. What could be they anticipating? What could the townspeople understand? Each occasion I revisit this author’s chilling and influential narrative, I’m reminded that the best horror comes from that which remains hidden.
An Acclaimed Writer
Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman
In this concise narrative a couple go to an ordinary coastal village in which chimes sound continuously, an incessant ringing that is irritating and unexplainable. The initial truly frightening episode takes place after dark, at the time they choose to go for a stroll and they fail to see the water. The beach is there, the scent exists of rotting fish and seawater, surf is audible, but the water seems phantom, or something else and worse. It’s just deeply malevolent and each occasion I visit to the shore at night I remember this tale which spoiled the sea at night in my view – positively.
The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, he’s not – head back to their lodging and discover why the bells ring, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden encounters danse macabre pandemonium. It’s an unnerving meditation about longing and deterioration, two people growing old jointly as a couple, the bond and brutality and affection of marriage.
Not only the scariest, but probably among the finest short stories available, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of these tales to be released locally in 2011.
A Prominent Novelist
Zombie by an esteemed writer
I perused this book near the water in the French countryside in 2020. Even with the bright weather I sensed cold creep within me. I also felt the electricity of anticipation. I was composing my latest book, and I faced a block. I was uncertain if there was an effective approach to compose various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Going through this book, I understood that it was possible.
Published in 1995, the book is a dark flight into the thoughts of a criminal, the protagonist, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who slaughtered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, Dahmer was obsessed with making a zombie sex slave that would remain him and attempted numerous grisly attempts to accomplish it.
The acts the novel describes are appalling, but equally frightening is the mental realism. The character’s dreadful, shattered existence is simply narrated using minimal words, details omitted. The audience is plunged trapped in his consciousness, obliged to see thoughts and actions that appal. The foreignness of his thinking is like a physical shock – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Starting Zombie feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.
Daisy Johnson
White Is for Witching from a gifted writer
During my youth, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the fear featured a vision where I was trapped inside a container and, upon awakening, I realized that I had torn off the slat from the window, seeking to leave. That building was falling apart; when storms came the ground floor corridor flooded, insect eggs dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and at one time a large rat ascended the window coverings in my sister’s room.
Once a companion handed me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living at my family home, but the narrative of the house located on the coastline seemed recognizable to me, homesick as I was. This is a novel concerning a ghostly loud, sentimental building and a girl who ingests limestone off the rocks. I cherished the novel deeply and went back again and again to the story, each time discovering {something
