Frightening Authors Discuss the Most Frightening Stories They've Actually Experienced

A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People from a master of suspense

I discovered this tale long ago and it has stayed with me ever since. The named seasonal visitors turn out to be the Allisons from New York, who rent the same off-grid rural cabin annually. On this occasion, rather than returning to urban life, they choose to extend their vacation for a month longer – an action that appears to alarm everyone in the surrounding community. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that not a soul has lingered at the lake beyond Labor Day. Even so, they insist to not leave, and at that point situations commence to get increasingly weird. The individual who delivers the kerosene refuses to sell for them. No one will deliver groceries to their home, and as the Allisons endeavor to go to the village, their vehicle fails to start. A storm gathers, the batteries within the device diminish, and as darkness falls, “the two old people huddled together inside their cabin and waited”. What might be they waiting for? What do the townspeople know? Each occasion I revisit Jackson’s unnerving and thought-provoking story, I’m reminded that the top terror originates in that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from a noted author

In this concise narrative two people go to a typical beach community in which chimes sound the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is irritating and inexplicable. The opening extremely terrifying scene happens at night, when they decide to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the sea. The beach is there, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and seawater, surf is audible, but the water appears spectral, or another thing and worse. It’s just profoundly ominous and each occasion I travel to the shore at night I think about this story which spoiled the ocean after dark for me – positively.

The newlyweds – she’s very young, he’s not – head back to the hotel and discover why the bells ring, in a long sequence of confinement, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden intersects with danse macabre bedlam. It’s a chilling contemplation on desire and decline, two bodies aging together as a couple, the bond and violence and tenderness within wedlock.

Not merely the most terrifying, but probably a top example of concise narratives out there, and an individual preference. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of this author’s works to be published locally several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer

I read Zombie by a pool overseas a few years ago. Although it was sunny I sensed a chill within me. Additionally, I sensed the electricity of excitement. I was composing a new project, and I had hit a block. I didn’t know if it was possible an effective approach to compose various frightening aspects the book contains. Going through this book, I realized that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a grim journey within the psyche of a criminal, the protagonist, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who murdered and dismembered multiple victims in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, this person was obsessed with producing a zombie sex slave who would stay by his side and carried out several horrific efforts to achieve this.

The acts the novel describes are appalling, but similarly terrifying is its own emotional authenticity. Quentin P’s terrible, shattered existence is directly described with concise language, identities hidden. The audience is plunged stuck in his mind, forced to observe mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The strangeness of his mind is like a physical shock – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Going into this story is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I was a somnambulist and later started suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the fear included a nightmare where I was trapped inside a container and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had torn off the slat from the window, seeking to leave. That home was crumbling; when storms came the downstairs hall became inundated, maggots dropped from above onto the bed, and once a large rat ascended the window coverings in that space.

Once a companion handed me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out in my childhood residence, but the narrative about the home located on the coastline felt familiar to me, nostalgic as I was. It’s a book about a haunted clamorous, atmospheric home and a young woman who ingests chalk off the rocks. I adored the novel immensely and came back frequently to the story, consistently uncovering {something

Amy Goodman
Amy Goodman

Lena is a digital strategist with over a decade of experience in helping businesses scale through innovative marketing techniques.