Scary Authors Share the Most Terrifying Stories They've Actually Experienced

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by a master of suspense

I read this story long ago and it has stayed with me from that moment. The so-called seasonal visitors are a couple from the city, who rent an identical remote country cottage annually. On this occasion, instead of going back to urban life, they choose to prolong their stay a few more weeks – a decision that to unsettle all the locals in the adjacent village. All pass on an identical cryptic advice that nobody has lingered at the lake past the holiday. Even so, the couple are resolved to stay, and at that point events begin to grow more bizarre. The man who brings fuel won’t sell for them. No one is willing to supply groceries to the cabin, and as the family try to go to the village, the automobile refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the energy in the radio diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple clung to each other in their summer cottage and waited”. What could be the Allisons expecting? What could the townspeople understand? Whenever I read the writer’s chilling and influential narrative, I recall that the top terror originates in what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a pair travel to a typical coastal village where bells ring the whole time, an incessant ringing that is annoying and unexplainable. The initial extremely terrifying episode occurs at night, as they opt to go for a stroll and they fail to see the water. There’s sand, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and brine, waves crash, but the water appears spectral, or another thing and worse. It’s just deeply malevolent and each occasion I travel to the coast after dark I think about this story that destroyed the sea at night to my mind – favorably.

The young couple – the woman is adolescent, the husband is older – go back to their lodging and find out why the bells ring, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and demise and innocence encounters grim ballet bedlam. It’s a chilling meditation about longing and decline, a pair of individuals aging together as spouses, the attachment and aggression and affection in matrimony.

Not just the scariest, but perhaps a top example of concise narratives in existence, and a personal favourite. I read it en español, in the first edition of Aickman stories to appear in this country several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I read this narrative beside the swimming area in the French countryside recently. Although it was sunny I felt an icy feeling through me. I also experienced the electricity of anticipation. I was writing a new project, and I faced an obstacle. I didn’t know whether there existed any good way to write various frightening aspects the book contains. Reading Zombie, I understood that it could be done.

Released decades ago, the story is a grim journey within the psyche of a criminal, Quentin P, based on a notorious figure, the serial killer who slaughtered and dismembered numerous individuals in a city during a specific period. Notoriously, Dahmer was obsessed with creating a compliant victim who would never leave by his side and carried out several horrific efforts to accomplish it.

The deeds the story tells are horrific, but equally frightening is its own mental realism. The protagonist’s terrible, shattered existence is directly described using minimal words, names redacted. The reader is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, compelled to observe ideas and deeds that shock. The alien nature of his thinking is like a tangible impact – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Entering this book is less like reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the terror included a nightmare where I was confined inside a container and, as I roused, I found that I had torn off a piece from the window, trying to get out. That building was falling apart; when it rained heavily the ground floor corridor flooded, insect eggs came down from the roof into the bedroom, and at one time a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in the bedroom.

Once a companion gave me this author’s book, I was no longer living with my parents, but the narrative of the house perched on the cliffs felt familiar to me, longing at that time. It’s a novel featuring a possessed loud, sentimental building and a young woman who ingests calcium from the shoreline. I cherished the book deeply and went back frequently to it, always finding {something