Frightening Authors Reveal the Most Frightening Tales They've Actually Experienced

A Renowned Horror Author

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I discovered this narrative long ago and it has haunted me ever since. The named seasonal visitors turn out to be a couple from the city, who lease an identical off-grid rural cabin annually. This time, rather than going back home, they opt to lengthen their holiday an extra month – something that seems to disturb everyone in the adjacent village. Each repeats an identical cryptic advice that nobody has remained at the lake past the end of summer. Even so, the couple are resolved to stay, and that is the moment things start to grow more bizarre. The individual who supplies the kerosene refuses to sell for them. Not a single person is willing to supply groceries to their home, and when the family endeavor to travel to the community, their vehicle won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the batteries in the radio die, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals clung to each other inside their cabin and expected”. What might be this couple waiting for? What do the locals understand? Every time I peruse Jackson’s unnerving and inspiring story, I recall that the top terror stems from that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by a noted author

In this brief tale a pair travel to an ordinary beach community in which chimes sound continuously, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and inexplicable. The opening truly frightening scene occurs during the evening, as they choose to take a walk and they are unable to locate the sea. There’s sand, there is the odor of decaying seafood and seawater, surf is audible, but the sea is a ghost, or a different entity and more dreadful. It’s just insanely sinister and each occasion I visit to the coast in the evening I think about this tale that ruined the ocean after dark in my view – in a good way.

The newlyweds – she’s very young, he’s not – go back to the hotel and find out the reason for the chiming, during a prolonged scene of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden encounters grim ballet chaos. It is a disturbing contemplation about longing and decline, two bodies aging together as spouses, the bond and aggression and affection of marriage.

Not just the most frightening, but perhaps among the finest concise narratives in existence, and a personal favourite. I read it in Spanish, in the first edition of these tales to appear locally several years back.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this book near the water in France a few years ago. Despite the sunshine I sensed a chill within me. I also felt the thrill of fascination. I was working on 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 there was a way.

Released decades ago, the book is a dark flight into the thoughts of a criminal, the protagonist, based on an infamous individual, the serial killer who killed and cut apart numerous individuals in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, Dahmer was consumed with creating a zombie sex slave who would never leave with him and made many grisly attempts to achieve this.

The deeds the book depicts are horrific, but similarly terrifying is its emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s dreadful, shattered existence is directly described in spare prose, identities hidden. The reader is immersed trapped in his consciousness, obliged to witness mental processes and behaviors that appal. The foreignness of his mind resembles a physical shock – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Starting this story is not just reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and later started having night terrors. Once, the horror included a vision during which I was confined in a box and, when I woke up, I found that I had ripped a piece off the window, trying to get out. That home was decaying; when it rained heavily the entranceway became inundated, insect eggs dropped from above into the bedroom, and at one time a large rat climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.

When a friend presented me with the story, I had moved out with my parents, but the story of the house high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to myself, nostalgic as I felt. This is a book concerning a ghostly noisy, atmospheric home and a female character who consumes chalk from the shoreline. I cherished the story so much and went back repeatedly to the story, each time discovering {something