Frightening Novelists Share the Scariest Narratives They have Actually Read
A Renowned Horror Author
The Summer People by a master of suspense
I read this tale years ago and it has stayed with me ever since. The so-called vacationers turn out to be the Allisons from New York, who occupy an identical isolated country cottage each year. During this visit, in place of heading back to the city, they decide to extend their stay an extra month – a decision that to unsettle everyone in the adjacent village. Each repeats the same veiled caution that no one has ever stayed by the water beyond the end of summer. Nonetheless, they are determined to stay, and that is the moment situations commence to become stranger. The person who delivers oil refuses to sell to the couple. Not a single person is willing to supply supplies to the cabin, and as the Allisons attempt to go to the village, their vehicle fails to start. A tempest builds, the energy in the radio diminish, and when night comes, “the aged individuals huddled together in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What could be the Allisons expecting? What might the townspeople be aware of? Whenever I revisit this author’s disturbing and inspiring narrative, I recall that the best horror stems from what’s left undisclosed.
Mariana Enríquez
An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman
In this concise narrative a pair travel to an ordinary beach community in which chimes sound constantly, a constant chiming that is irritating and puzzling. The first extremely terrifying scene happens after dark, as they choose to go for a stroll and they fail to see the ocean. The beach is there, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and seawater, surf is audible, but the water appears spectral, or something else and even more alarming. It is simply deeply malevolent and every time I travel to the coast at night I recall this tale which spoiled the beach in the evening to my mind – in a good way.
The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – head back to the inn and discover the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and demise and innocence intersects with dance of death pandemonium. It’s a chilling reflection about longing and decay, a pair of individuals aging together as spouses, the attachment and brutality and tenderness in matrimony.
Not merely the most frightening, but perhaps one of the best concise narratives available, and an individual preference. I experienced it en español, in the debut release of these tales to be released in Argentina in 2011.
A Prominent Novelist
Zombie by an esteemed writer
I delved into Zombie beside the swimming area overseas a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I felt a chill through me. Additionally, I sensed the excitement of fascination. I was composing a new project, and I had hit a block. I didn’t know whether there existed any good way to write some of the fearful things the book contains. Going through this book, I realized that there was a way.
Published in 1995, the novel is a bleak exploration through the mind of a criminal, Quentin P, modeled after an infamous individual, the criminal who slaughtered and cut apart multiple victims in the Midwest during a specific period. Infamously, this person was fixated with creating a zombie sex slave who would never leave by his side and carried out several macabre trials to achieve this.
The actions the story tells are appalling, but just as scary is its own mental realism. Quentin P’s awful, shattered existence is plainly told in spare prose, details omitted. The audience is plunged caught in his thoughts, forced to see mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The foreignness of his mind is like a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Entering Zombie is not just reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.
An Accomplished Author
A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi
In my early years, I sleepwalked and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. Once, the horror featured a vision in which I was confined within an enclosure and, as I roused, I realized that I had ripped the slat from the window, seeking to leave. That building was falling apart; when storms came the ground floor corridor became inundated, maggots fell from the ceiling on to my parents’ bed, and once a large rat ascended the window coverings in my sister’s room.
Once a companion gave me the story, I had moved out with my parents, but the narrative regarding the building located on the coastline felt familiar in my view, nostalgic as I felt. It is a novel concerning a ghostly loud, atmospheric home and a young woman who consumes limestone from the shoreline. I cherished the book immensely and returned repeatedly to it, always finding {something