Frightening Writers Reveal the Most Frightening Tales They've Ever Experienced

A Renowned Horror Author

A Chilling Tale by a master of suspense

I discovered this narrative long ago and it has haunted me since then. The so-called “summer people” happen to be the Allisons from New York, who lease an identical remote country cottage each year. During this visit, rather than heading back to the city, they choose to lengthen their holiday a few more weeks – an action that appears to unsettle each resident in the surrounding community. All pass on the same veiled caution that not a soul has ever stayed at the lake after the holiday. Even so, the couple are determined to stay, and that is the moment situations commence to grow more bizarre. The person who delivers fuel declines to provide to the couple. No one will deliver food to the cabin, and as the Allisons try to drive into town, the automobile won’t start. A storm gathers, the energy of their radio diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the aged individuals clung to each other within their rental and anticipated”. What are they expecting? What do the locals understand? Every time I revisit Jackson’s unnerving and thought-provoking tale, I recall that the finest fright comes from the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a couple travel to an ordinary coastal village in which chimes sound the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is irritating and unexplainable. The first very scary episode happens at night, when they decide to go for a stroll and they can’t find the ocean. The beach is there, there’s the smell of rotting fish and brine, waves crash, but the sea is a ghost, or another thing and more dreadful. It is truly profoundly ominous and each occasion I visit to the shore after dark I think about this tale which spoiled the beach in the evening for me – in a good way.

The newlyweds – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – go back to their lodging and find out the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of confinement, gruesome festivities and demise and innocence intersects with dance of death bedlam. It’s a chilling meditation regarding craving and decline, two people maturing in tandem as a couple, the connection and aggression and affection of marriage.

Not just the most terrifying, but likely one of the best short stories available, and an individual preference. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of Aickman stories to appear in this country a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I perused this book near the water in the French countryside recently. Even with the bright weather I felt an icy feeling through me. I also felt the electricity of fascination. I was working on a new project, and I had hit an obstacle. I wasn’t sure whether there existed an effective approach to write various frightening aspects the story includes. Reading Zombie, I understood that it was possible.

Published in 1995, the book is a grim journey into the thoughts of a criminal, the protagonist, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who slaughtered and mutilated numerous individuals in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, this person was consumed with producing a submissive individual who would never leave with him and made many grisly attempts to accomplish it.

The acts the story tells are horrific, but similarly terrifying is its mental realism. The character’s terrible, shattered existence is plainly told with concise language, identities hidden. The audience is immersed trapped in his consciousness, forced to see ideas and deeds that shock. The alien nature of his thinking resembles a tangible impact – or finding oneself isolated on a desolate planet. Starting Zombie is not just reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel by a gifted writer

During my youth, I walked in my sleep and eventually began having night terrors. Once, the terror included a vision during which I was stuck in a box and, upon awakening, I realized that I had torn off the slat off the window, trying to get out. That house was falling apart; during heavy rain the ground floor corridor filled with water, maggots came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a large rat scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

After an acquaintance handed me the story, I had moved out with my parents, but the story of the house located on the coastline felt familiar in my view, homesick at that time. It’s a book featuring a possessed clamorous, sentimental building and a girl who consumes calcium from the shoreline. I loved the story deeply and returned again and again to the story, each time discovering {something

Jenna Mayer
Jenna Mayer

Elara is a certified life coach and writer passionate about empowering others through practical self-improvement techniques and motivational content.