Scary Writers Share the Most Frightening Stories They've Ever Encountered

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by a master of suspense

I encountered this story long ago and it has haunted me ever since. The named “summer people” happen to be a family from the city, who occupy the same remote lakeside house annually. This time, in place of heading back to urban life, they decide to prolong their holiday an extra month – an action that appears to disturb each resident in the surrounding community. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that nobody has ever stayed in the area after the holiday. Even so, they are determined to remain, and that’s when events begin to grow more bizarre. The man who brings the kerosene declines to provide for them. Not a single person agrees to bring food to their home, and as the family endeavor to go to the village, the car fails to start. Bad weather approaches, the batteries within the device die, and when night comes, “the two old people clung to each other within their rental and expected”. What are they waiting for? What could the townspeople understand? Each occasion I read Jackson’s unnerving and thought-provoking tale, I recall that the best horror originates in that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by a noted author

In this short story a couple travel to a common seaside town in which chimes sound the whole time, an incessant ringing that is irritating and puzzling. The first truly frightening episode occurs at night, at the time they choose to take a walk and they can’t find the ocean. There’s sand, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and salt, waves crash, but the ocean seems phantom, or another thing and more dreadful. It’s just deeply malevolent and each occasion I go to the coast at night I remember this tale that ruined the sea at night in my view – in a good way.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – head back to the hotel and find out the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, necro-orgy and mortality and youth encounters danse macabre bedlam. It is a disturbing reflection about longing and deterioration, a pair of individuals maturing in tandem as spouses, the connection and brutality and tenderness in matrimony.

Not just the most terrifying, but perhaps one of the best short stories out there, and a beloved choice. I read it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of this author’s works to appear in Argentina several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I read this book by a pool in the French countryside recently. Despite the sunshine I felt an icy feeling over me. Additionally, I sensed the thrill of anticipation. I was working on a new project, and I faced a wall. I was uncertain if it was possible an effective approach to write various frightening aspects the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I saw that it could be done.

Published in 1995, the novel is a dark flight into the thoughts of a young serial killer, the main character, based on an infamous individual, the criminal who murdered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, Dahmer was obsessed with creating a zombie sex slave that would remain by his side and attempted numerous grisly attempts to accomplish it.

The acts the book depicts are horrific, but equally frightening is its mental realism. The protagonist’s dreadful, fragmented world is directly described with concise language, details omitted. The audience is immersed trapped in his consciousness, obliged to observe ideas and deeds that appal. The foreignness of his psyche is like a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Going into this story feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from a gifted writer

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and later started suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the fear included a dream in which I was confined inside a container and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had torn off a piece from the window, seeking to leave. That home was falling apart; during heavy rain the ground floor corridor became inundated, fly larvae came down from the roof into the bedroom, and at one time a large rat scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

After an acquaintance handed me the story, I had moved out with my parents, but the story regarding the building located on the coastline felt familiar to myself, homesick as I was. It is a book featuring a possessed noisy, atmospheric home and a girl who eats limestone off the rocks. I cherished the book deeply and went back repeatedly to its pages, always finding {something