Frightening Writers Reveal the Most Terrifying Stories They've Actually Read

A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People by a master of suspense

I discovered this tale years ago and it has stayed with me from that moment. The so-called seasonal visitors turn out to be the Allisons from New York, who rent a particular off-grid lakeside house annually. This time, rather than going back to the city, they decide to extend their holiday an extra month – a decision that to disturb all the locals in the nearby town. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that not a soul has remained in the area past Labor Day. Even so, the Allisons are resolved to stay, and that is the moment situations commence to become stranger. The individual who delivers oil refuses to sell for them. No one agrees to bring groceries to the cabin, and as they endeavor to go to the village, their vehicle won’t start. A storm gathers, the energy of their radio die, and when night comes, “the two old people crowded closely in their summer cottage and expected”. What could be this couple waiting for? What could the residents understand? Every time I revisit the writer’s chilling and thought-provoking narrative, I recall that the best horror originates in what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman

In this short story a couple go to an ordinary seaside town where church bells toll continuously, a perpetual pealing that is annoying and puzzling. The opening extremely terrifying episode takes place at night, as they opt to take a walk and they fail to see the ocean. The beach is there, the scent exists of decaying seafood and brine, surf is audible, but the water is a ghost, or another thing and worse. It’s just insanely sinister and every time I go to a beach after dark I recall this story that destroyed the ocean after dark for me – in a good way.

The recent spouses – she’s very young, he’s not – head back to their lodging and find out the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and demise and innocence meets grim ballet chaos. It is a disturbing meditation regarding craving and decay, two people aging together as a couple, the connection and brutality and affection in matrimony.

Not merely the scariest, but likely among the finest short stories available, and an individual preference. I read it in Spanish, in the debut release of these tales to be released in this country in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I read Zombie beside the swimming area overseas in 2020. Although it was sunny I experienced an icy feeling over me. Additionally, I sensed the electricity of fascination. I was writing my latest book, and I encountered an obstacle. I didn’t know if there was any good way to write certain terrifying elements the story includes. Reading Zombie, I saw that there was a way.

Published in 1995, the book is a bleak exploration into the thoughts of a criminal, the protagonist, modeled after an infamous individual, the criminal who killed and cut apart multiple victims in a city over a decade. Infamously, this person was obsessed with creating a compliant victim who would never leave him and made many macabre trials to achieve this.

The actions the story tells are appalling, but equally frightening is its own mental realism. Quentin P’s dreadful, fragmented world is plainly told in spare prose, names redacted. The audience is plunged stuck in his mind, obliged to witness thoughts and actions that horrify. The alien nature of his mind is like a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated on a desolate planet. Entering Zombie feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

During my youth, I walked in my sleep and later started having night terrors. On one occasion, the fear included a nightmare during which I was confined within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had removed a part from the window, seeking to leave. That building was falling apart; when storms came the ground floor corridor filled with water, maggots dropped from above onto the bed, and at one time a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in that space.

Once a companion presented me with this author’s book, I was no longer living with my parents, but the narrative regarding the building located on the coastline appeared known to me, longing as I felt. This is a book featuring a possessed clamorous, sentimental building and a girl who ingests calcium from the shoreline. I loved the story so much and came back repeatedly to its pages, each time discovering {something