Frightening Novelists Reveal the Most Frightening Stories They've Actually Read

A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I read this narrative years ago and it has haunted me ever since. The so-called seasonal visitors happen to be a family from the city, who rent the same remote lakeside house annually. During this visit, in place of returning to the city, they decide to lengthen their vacation a few more weeks – something that seems to alarm everyone in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys the same veiled caution that not a soul has lingered by the water beyond the holiday. Nonetheless, the Allisons are resolved to stay, and at that point things start to become stranger. The individual who brings oil declines to provide to the couple. Nobody is willing to supply groceries to the cabin, and at the time the family try to go to the village, their vehicle fails to start. A storm gathers, the energy in the radio die, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals crowded closely in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What could be they expecting? What do the townspeople know? Whenever I revisit the writer’s disturbing and inspiring narrative, I recall that the top terror stems from that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes from a noted author

In this brief tale a pair journey to an ordinary beach community where church bells toll constantly, an incessant ringing that is annoying and puzzling. The opening very scary episode takes place after dark, when they choose to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the water. There’s sand, the scent exists of putrid marine life and seawater, there are waves, but the sea appears spectral, or something else and worse. It’s just deeply malevolent and whenever I travel to a beach after dark I remember this narrative that ruined the ocean after dark in my view – positively.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – head back to their lodging and find out why the bells ring, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and mortality and youth encounters danse macabre bedlam. It’s an unnerving reflection regarding craving and deterioration, two bodies aging together as partners, the attachment and brutality and affection of marriage.

Not merely the most frightening, but perhaps a top example of short stories in existence, and a personal favourite. I read it en español, in the first edition of this author’s works to be published in this country in 2011.

Catriona Ward

Zombie from an esteemed writer

I perused Zombie by a pool in France in 2020. Despite the sunshine I sensed a chill within me. I also experienced the excitement of fascination. I was writing my latest book, and I faced a wall. I didn’t know whether there existed a proper method to write certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Experiencing this novel, I understood that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a grim journey within the psyche of a young serial killer, the main character, modeled after a notorious figure, the serial killer who slaughtered and mutilated numerous individuals in Milwaukee over a decade. As is well-known, Dahmer was obsessed with making a submissive individual who would stay with him and carried out several horrific efforts to achieve this.

The acts the book depicts are appalling, but equally frightening is its mental realism. The protagonist’s awful, shattered existence is plainly told in spare prose, identities hidden. The reader is sunk deep stuck in his mind, forced to see thoughts and actions that shock. The strangeness of his psyche resembles a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Starting Zombie feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by a gifted writer

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and later started having night terrors. On one occasion, the terror involved a nightmare in which I was confined inside a container and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had ripped a piece from the window, trying to get out. That home was decaying; when storms came the ground floor corridor flooded, maggots dropped from above onto the bed, and once a large rat ascended the window coverings in my sister’s room.

When a friend presented me with this author’s book, I had moved out with my parents, but the narrative about the home located on the coastline felt familiar to me, longing at that time. It is a story about a haunted clamorous, atmospheric home and a female character who eats chalk from the cliffs. I adored the story deeply and went back again and again to its pages, consistently uncovering {something