Horror Novelists Discuss the Most Frightening Stories They have Actually Read

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense

I encountered this tale some time back and it has haunted me since then. The titular seasonal visitors are the Allisons urban dwellers, who occupy an identical off-grid rural cabin each year. On this occasion, rather than going back to the city, they decide to extend their holiday an extra month – an action that appears to unsettle all the locals in the adjacent village. Each repeats an identical cryptic advice that not a soul has lingered in the area beyond Labor Day. Even so, the couple are resolved to stay, and that’s when things start to get increasingly weird. The man who supplies the kerosene declines to provide to the couple. No one agrees to bring supplies to the cabin, and when the Allisons try to travel to the community, their vehicle refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the power in the radio fade, and when night comes, “the two old people clung to each other in their summer cottage and waited”. What are they anticipating? What might the residents be aware of? Every time I peruse the writer’s chilling and inspiring narrative, I’m reminded that the top terror stems from the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes from a noted author

In this short story two people journey to a common beach community in which chimes sound continuously, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and puzzling. The opening very scary episode occurs at night, at the time they decide to take a walk and they can’t find the water. There’s sand, there’s the smell of rotting fish and seawater, waves crash, but the ocean appears spectral, or a different entity and more dreadful. It is simply profoundly ominous and every time I visit to the shore at night I recall this story that destroyed the sea at night for me – in a good way.

The newlyweds – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – head back to the hotel and discover the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of confinement, necro-orgy and mortality and youth encounters dance of death bedlam. It is a disturbing contemplation on desire and deterioration, two people maturing in tandem as spouses, the bond and aggression and tenderness in matrimony.

Not only the most terrifying, but likely among the finest short stories out there, and a personal favourite. I read it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of these tales to be released locally several years back.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I perused this book by a pool overseas in 2020. Despite the sunshine I sensed an icy feeling over me. I also experienced the electricity of excitement. I was writing a new project, and I had hit a block. I was uncertain whether there existed any good way to compose some of the fearful things the book contains. Experiencing this novel, I understood that it was possible.

Published in 1995, the novel is a grim journey through the mind of a murderer, the protagonist, modeled after an infamous individual, the criminal who slaughtered and mutilated 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, this person was consumed with creating a compliant victim who would never leave him and attempted numerous macabre trials to accomplish it.

The actions the novel describes are appalling, but equally frightening is the mental realism. The character’s dreadful, fragmented world is plainly told using minimal words, identities hidden. The reader is plunged caught in his thoughts, compelled to observe thoughts and actions that appal. The strangeness of his psyche resembles a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Entering this story is not just reading than a full body experience. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from a gifted writer

During my youth, I walked in my sleep and subsequently commenced having night terrors. At one point, the terror included a vision in which I was trapped in a box and, upon awakening, I found that I had torn off a piece from the window, trying to get out. That building was falling apart; during heavy rain the entranceway flooded, fly larvae came down from the roof into the bedroom, and on one occasion a big rodent climbed the drapes in the bedroom.

When a friend handed me the story, I had moved out with my parents, but the narrative regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to myself, homesick as I was. It is a story concerning a ghostly noisy, emotional house and a young woman who eats calcium from the cliffs. I adored the novel so much and came back frequently to it, each time discovering {something