Frightening Novelists Share the Most Frightening Narratives They have Ever Experienced
Andrew Michael Hurley
A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson
I encountered this tale years ago and it has stayed with me from that moment. The named seasonal visitors turn out to be a couple from New York, who rent an identical off-grid rural cabin annually. During this visit, instead of going back home, they choose to lengthen their holiday a few more weeks – an action that appears to disturb each resident in the nearby town. Everyone conveys the same veiled caution that nobody has lingered in the area beyond Labor Day. Even so, the Allisons are resolved to stay, and that’s when things start to get increasingly weird. The man who brings oil declines to provide to the couple. Not a single person will deliver groceries to their home, and when the family endeavor to go to the village, the car refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the energy within the device diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple clung to each other in their summer cottage and waited”. What are this couple waiting for? What could the locals understand? Whenever I peruse this author’s chilling and thought-provoking narrative, I’m reminded that the finest fright originates in the unspoken.
An Acclaimed Writer
Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman
In this short story a couple travel to an ordinary beach community where bells ring the whole time, a constant chiming that is annoying and unexplainable. The initial very scary moment takes place during the evening, when they opt to take a walk and they can’t find the ocean. There’s sand, there is the odor of putrid marine life and brine, waves crash, but the ocean is a ghost, or another thing and even more alarming. It’s just deeply malevolent and whenever I go to a beach in the evening I remember this narrative that destroyed the beach in the evening in my view – positively.
The newlyweds – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – head back to the hotel and find out the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and demise and innocence encounters dance of death bedlam. It’s a chilling reflection regarding craving and decline, two bodies growing old jointly as partners, the attachment and brutality and gentleness in matrimony.
Not just the most frightening, but probably one of the best concise narratives out there, and a beloved choice. I read it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of these tales to appear locally in 2011.
A Prominent Novelist
Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates
I perused this book beside the swimming area in France in 2020. Although it was sunny I experienced an icy feeling over me. I also experienced the thrill of anticipation. I was composing my third novel, and I faced a block. I didn’t know if it was possible an effective approach to craft certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Going through this book, I understood that it could be done.
Published in 1995, the story is a grim journey into the thoughts of a criminal, Quentin P, inspired by a notorious figure, the criminal who murdered and mutilated 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee during a specific period. Infamously, this person was fixated with making a submissive individual who would never leave him and carried out several macabre trials to do so.
The acts the novel describes are terrible, but equally frightening is its own mental realism. The protagonist’s terrible, broken reality is plainly told in spare prose, identities hidden. The reader is immersed stuck in his mind, compelled to see ideas and deeds that appal. The foreignness of his thinking resembles a tangible impact – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Entering this book is less like reading than a full body experience. You are consumed entirely.
An Accomplished Author
White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi
When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and later started experiencing nightmares. On one occasion, the fear involved a nightmare in which I was confined in a box and, as I roused, I discovered that I had removed the slat off the window, seeking to leave. That home was crumbling; when storms came the downstairs hall flooded, fly larvae came down from the roof into the bedroom, and on one occasion a big rodent scaled the curtains in my sister’s room.
When a friend gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere in my childhood residence, but the tale regarding the building located on the coastline appeared known to myself, longing as I felt. It is a book featuring a possessed clamorous, atmospheric home and a young woman who consumes limestone from the shoreline. I adored the story deeply and returned repeatedly to its pages, each time discovering {something
