Frightening Novelists Reveal the Most Frightening Narratives They have Ever Read
Andrew Michael Hurley
The Summer People from a master of suspense
I discovered this narrative some time back and it has haunted me since then. The named vacationers are a couple urban dwellers, who rent a particular remote lakeside house annually. During this visit, in place of heading back to the city, they opt to prolong their vacation for a month longer – a decision that to unsettle all the locals in the adjacent village. All pass on a similar vague warning that not a soul has lingered by the water beyond the end of summer. Regardless, the Allisons insist to remain, and at that point events begin to grow more bizarre. The person who supplies oil won’t sell for them. No one agrees to bring groceries to the cottage, and when the Allisons try to go to the village, their vehicle won’t start. A storm gathers, the power within the device diminish, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals crowded closely within their rental and anticipated”. What might be they waiting for? What do the locals know? Every time I peruse the writer’s chilling and inspiring narrative, I’m reminded that the top terror comes from that which remains hidden.
An Acclaimed Writer
An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman
In this short story a pair go to a common beach community where church bells toll continuously, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and puzzling. The first truly frightening moment occurs after dark, when they decide to walk around and they fail to see the water. Sand is present, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and salt, surf is audible, but the sea is a ghost, or another thing and worse. It is truly profoundly ominous and each occasion I visit to the coast after dark I think about this story which spoiled the beach in the evening for me – in a good way.
The newlyweds – she’s very young, he’s not – return to the inn and discover the reason for the chiming, during a prolonged scene of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and demise and innocence encounters grim ballet chaos. It’s an unnerving reflection about longing and decay, a pair of individuals aging together as partners, the bond and violence and gentleness within wedlock.
Not only the most terrifying, but likely one of the best concise narratives out there, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in Spanish, in the first edition of these tales to appear in this country a decade ago.
A Prominent Novelist
A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer
I delved into this book by a pool overseas in 2020. Despite the sunshine I felt an icy feeling over me. I also felt the excitement of excitement. I was writing my latest book, and I encountered an obstacle. I wasn’t sure if there was any good way to compose various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Going through this book, I realized that it could be done.
First printed in the nineties, the story is a bleak exploration into the thoughts of a young serial killer, the protagonist, inspired by an infamous individual, the serial killer who slaughtered and mutilated multiple victims in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, Dahmer was consumed with producing a compliant victim who would stay him and carried out several horrific efforts to do so.
The deeds the book depicts are appalling, but equally frightening is its emotional authenticity. Quentin P’s awful, shattered existence is directly described in spare prose, identities hidden. The reader is plunged trapped in his consciousness, forced to witness mental processes and behaviors that appal. The strangeness of his psyche is like a bodily jolt – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Entering this story is not just reading than a full body experience. You are consumed entirely.
Daisy Johnson
A Haunting Novel from a gifted writer
When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and later started suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the horror featured a dream in which I was confined in a box and, as I roused, I discovered that I had ripped the slat out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That house was crumbling; during heavy rain the ground floor corridor flooded, fly larvae fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and once a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in that space.
Once a companion handed me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living in my childhood residence, but the tale regarding the building perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable to myself, nostalgic at that time. It is a book concerning a ghostly noisy, atmospheric home and a female character who eats calcium from the cliffs. I cherished the novel deeply and went back repeatedly to its pages, consistently uncovering {something
