Frightening Authors Reveal the Most Frightening Stories They have Actually Experienced

A Renowned Horror Author

A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense

I read this narrative some time back and it has haunted me since then. The titular vacationers are the Allisons from the city, who occupy a particular isolated rural cabin every summer. On this occasion, instead of going back to urban life, they opt to extend their stay for a month longer – a decision that to unsettle everyone in the surrounding community. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that nobody has remained by the water after Labor Day. Regardless, the Allisons insist to not leave, and that is the moment things start to grow more bizarre. The individual who supplies oil refuses to sell to the couple. Not a single person agrees to bring supplies to the cottage, and when the family attempt to go to the village, their vehicle fails to start. Bad weather approaches, the batteries within the device die, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple huddled together in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What are the Allisons anticipating? What might the residents understand? Every time I revisit Jackson’s disturbing and inspiring tale, I recall that the top terror originates in that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this short story two people go to a common beach community in which chimes sound the whole time, an incessant ringing that is annoying and puzzling. The opening very scary scene occurs at night, at the time they choose to take a walk and they fail to see the sea. There’s sand, the scent exists of rotting fish and seawater, surf is audible, but the sea is a ghost, or a different entity and worse. It’s just profoundly ominous and whenever I visit to the shore in the evening I remember this story that destroyed the ocean after dark in my view – favorably.

The young couple – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – go back to the hotel and discover the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden meets dance of death pandemonium. It’s a chilling meditation on desire and deterioration, two people growing old jointly as partners, the bond and aggression and affection in matrimony.

Not only the scariest, but perhaps a top example of brief tales out there, and a personal favourite. I experienced it en español, in the first edition of this author’s works to be released in this country a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this narrative near the water in the French countryside in 2020. Although it was sunny I sensed an icy feeling through me. I also experienced the excitement of excitement. I was writing a new project, and I encountered an obstacle. I was uncertain whether there existed a proper method to write certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I saw that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a dark flight through the mind of a murderer, the main character, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who killed and mutilated multiple victims in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, Dahmer was fixated with producing a submissive individual who would never leave by his side and attempted numerous macabre trials to accomplish it.

The actions the story tells are horrific, but similarly terrifying is its mental realism. The character’s awful, fragmented world is simply narrated with concise language, details omitted. The audience is plunged stuck in his mind, obliged to witness thoughts and actions that shock. The strangeness of his mind feels like a physical shock – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Entering this story is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I walked in my sleep and later started suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the fear featured a dream during which I was trapped inside a container and, as I roused, I discovered that I had removed a piece from the window, seeking to leave. That home was decaying; when storms came the downstairs hall filled with water, maggots fell from the ceiling onto the bed, and at one time a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in that space.

Once a companion presented me with this author’s book, I had moved out in my childhood residence, but the story about the home perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable to myself, nostalgic at that time. It’s a story about a haunted noisy, emotional house and a young woman who consumes calcium from the cliffs. I cherished the book so much and came back again and again to its pages, always finding {something