Horror Authors Discuss the Most Terrifying Narratives They've Actually Encountered

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by a master of suspense

I discovered this narrative long ago and it has lingered with me since then. The named “summer people” turn out to be a couple from the city, who occupy a particular remote rural cabin each year. During this visit, rather than heading back home, they opt to lengthen their stay an extra month – something that seems to alarm everyone in the nearby town. Each repeats a similar vague warning that not a soul has lingered in the area past the holiday. Even so, they are resolved to remain, and at that point situations commence to get increasingly weird. The person who delivers fuel declines to provide to the couple. No one will deliver supplies to their home, and as they endeavor to travel to the community, their vehicle fails to start. A tempest builds, the batteries of their radio die, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple clung to each other in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What are they waiting for? What do the locals be aware of? Whenever I revisit this author’s disturbing and thought-provoking story, I’m reminded that the best horror comes from that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by a noted author

In this brief tale a couple go to an ordinary coastal village where bells ring continuously, a constant chiming that is annoying and unexplainable. The first extremely terrifying scene occurs at night, when they decide to take a walk and they fail to see the ocean. The beach is there, the scent exists of decaying seafood and salt, waves crash, but the sea seems phantom, or a different entity and even more alarming. It is truly deeply malevolent and whenever I travel to a beach at night I remember this tale that destroyed the sea at night for me – in a good way.

The young couple – the woman is adolescent, he’s not – return to the hotel and learn the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and demise and innocence intersects with dance of death chaos. It’s a chilling reflection about longing and decay, two bodies aging together as partners, the connection and violence and tenderness of marriage.

Not merely the most terrifying, but perhaps among the finest short stories in existence, and an individual preference. I read it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of this author’s works to appear in Argentina several years back.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I delved into this narrative near the water in the French countryside a few years ago. Despite the sunshine I experienced a chill within me. I also felt the electricity of excitement. I was writing my latest book, and I faced an obstacle. I didn’t know if it was possible a proper method to craft some of the fearful things the story includes. Going through this book, I understood that it could be done.

Published in 1995, the book is a bleak exploration through the mind of a murderer, the main character, based on a notorious figure, the serial killer who slaughtered and mutilated numerous individuals in a city during a specific period. Infamously, the killer was obsessed with making a submissive individual who would never leave by his side and carried out several grisly attempts to achieve this.

The actions the novel describes are terrible, but similarly terrifying is its own psychological persuasiveness. The character’s dreadful, fragmented world is simply narrated with concise language, names redacted. The reader is immersed trapped in his consciousness, obliged to observe mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The strangeness of his thinking resembles a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Entering this story is less like reading than a full body experience. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel by a gifted writer

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and subsequently commenced suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the horror included a dream during which I was confined in a box and, upon awakening, I discovered that I had torn off the slat off the window, trying to get out. That home was crumbling; during heavy rain the entranceway became inundated, fly larvae came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and once a big rodent scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

When a friend handed me the story, I was residing elsewhere at my family home, but the narrative of the house perched on the cliffs felt familiar to me, homesick as I was. It is a story about a haunted noisy, atmospheric home and a female character who consumes chalk off the rocks. I cherished the book so much and returned again and again to it, always finding {something