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Andrew Michael Hurley
The Summer People by Shirley Jackson
I read this years ago and it’s a story that’s truly haunted me ever since. The titular “summer people” are the Allisons from New York, who rent the same off-grid country cottage each year. This time, instead of heading back to the city, they decide to extend their holiday for a month longer – something that seems to unsettle everyone in the nearby town. All pass on the same veiled caution that nobody has ever stayed at the lake beyond Labor Day. Nonetheless, the Allisons are determined to remain, and that’s when things start to get increasingly weird. The man who delivers the kerosene won’t sell to them. No one will deliver groceries to the cottage, and when the Allisons attempt to drive into town, the car won’t start. A storm gathers, the batteries in the radio fade, and as darkness falls, “the two old people huddled together in their summer cottage and waited”. What are the Allisons waiting for? What do the locals know? Every time I read Jackson’s unnerving and inspiring story, I’m reminded that the best horror comes from what’s left undisclosed.
Saltwash by Andrew Michael Hurley is published by John Murray.
Mariana Enríquez
Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman
In this short story a couple travel to an ordinary seaside town where bells ring the whole time, a constant chiming that is annoying and inexplicable. The first very scary scene happens at night, when they decide to take a walk and they can’t find the sea. There’s sand, there’s the smell of rotting fish and salt, there are waves, but the sea is a ghost, or something else and worse. It’s just insanely sinister and every time I go to a beach at night I think about this story that ruined the sea at night for me – in a good way.
The newlyweds – she’s very young, he’s not – go back to the hotel and find out why the bells ring, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and death-and-the-maiden meets danse macabre pandemonium. It’s an unnerving meditation on desire and decay, two bodies aging together as a couple, the attachment and violence and tenderness of marriage.
Not only the scariest, but probably one of the best short stories out there, and a personal favourite. I read it in Spanish, in the first edition of Aickman stories to be published in Argentina in 2011, La aparición, edited by Matías Serra Bradford and translated by Agustín Pico Estrada and Laura Wittner.
Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave by Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell, is published by Granta.
Catriona Ward
Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates
I read Zombie by a pool in France in 2020. Despite the sunshine I felt cold creep through me. I also felt the electricity of excitement. I was writing my third novel, The Last House on Needless Street, and I had hit a wall. I didn’t know if there was any good way to write some of the fearful things the book contains. Reading Zombie, I saw that it was possible.
Published in 1995, the novel is a dark flight through the mind of a young serial killer, Quentin P, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who murdered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, Dahmer was obsessed with creating a zombie sex slave who would never leave him and made many grisly attempts to do so.
The acts the novel describes are horrific, but equally frightening is its psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s terrible, fragmented world is simply narrated in spare prose, names redacted. The reader is sunk deep, trapped in his consciousness, forced to witness thoughts and actions that appal. The foreignness of his mind is like a physical shock – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Going into Zombie is less like reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.
Nowhere Burning by Catriona Ward will be published by Viper in February 2026.
Daisy Johnson
White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi
When I was a child, I sleepwalked and later started having night terrors. Once, the terror involved a dream in which I was stuck in a box and, when I woke up, I found that I had torn off the slat from the window, trying to get out. That house was crumbling; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall filled with water, fly larvae fell from the ceiling on to my parents’ bed, and once a large rat scaled the curtains in my sister’s room.
When a friend gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living with my parents, but the story of the house high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to me, homesick as I was. It is a novel about a haunted, noisy, emotional house and a girl who eats chalk from the cliffs. I loved the book so much and returned again and again to it, always finding something new.
The Hotel by Daisy Johnson is published by Vintage.
Ned Beauman
Incarnations of Burned Children by David Foster Wallace
If you were ever swapping scary stories around a campfire, and everyone else was talking about ghosts and ghouls and hitchers with hooks for hands, but when your turn came you adjusted your spectacles and said, “Actually, I think nothing is scarier than the thought of a parent accidentally harming their child” – well, you probably wouldn’t get invited camping again. Which is why I was reluctant to select this David Foster Wallace story about a baby getting burned by boiling water. It is not appropriate for Halloween; it will not give you anything resembling a delicious shiver down your spine. But the fact is, no other piece of fiction I have ever read, supernatural or otherwise, has haunted me like this one has, so it would be dishonest to pick anything else.
And that’s despite my not being a parent – which, indeed, Wallace wasn’t, either. So, who knows, maybe this is just a bachelor’s idea of what hurting your child might be like, particularly since it first appeared in Esquire magazine, between an ad for hair-loss cream and another for Marlboro Lights. But for me, this story isn’t only about parenting, it’s about the possibility that out of sheer random chance you might become culpable for something that ruins someone else’s life as well as your own. In that sense, it may not look like horror fiction but it certainly functions as horror fiction.
Also, Wallace was a Stephen King fan and put his novels on the syllabus when he taught college English, so as you read this scene of a mother and father tending helplessly to their maimed little son, it’s reasonable to wonder if Wallace had Pet Sematary at the back of his mind.
The Captive by Ned Beauman, writing as Kit Burgoyne, is published by Titan.
Stephen Graham Jones
The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum
Humans are the worst monsters. You never know what’s going on in your neighbour’s basement. But sometimes you do, and sometimes you’re part of it … It’s summer for some kids in 1950s suburban America, but instead of having a mystery to solve, a monster to put down, they have to face the darkness in themselves, and then live with that new awareness.
You come out the other side of reading this book a different person, never mind if you liked it or not. This isn’t a novel you’re really supposed to like, yet it has a moral centre all the same. The question is: do you think that way too? Even for a glimmer of a moment, do you identify with someone here? The best art is dangerous and doesn’t flinch. This is that.
The Buffalo Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones is published by Titan.
Hollie Starling
I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison
A century after humanity’s extermination, five people remain on Earth, kept alive and tortured for the sadistic pleasure of an omniscient supercomputer. Don’t be put off if you’re not a sci-fi reader; neither am I. Let me put you off another way. I first read the story in the waiting room at Doncaster station where my train home from university was often cancelled, meaning the two purgatories are sensorily wedded, like a madeleine made of melted eyeballs. I felt my tender brain plasticise around Ellison’s descriptions, sick and gleeful at being made to actually consider “the smell of sulphur, of rancid butter … of human scalps”. I hated it then for what I couldn’t un-know. I hate it now because Ellison wrote it in one sitting without edits. His exquisite vision of synthetic hell is a first draft.
Reading it back, I find the camp excess very funny, but the famously nihilist ending is still the most frightening thing I’ve known. The horror of forces beyond our control – whether savage god, hostile landscape or distorted ideology – jangle my nerves more than any flimsy old ghost and was chief in my mind while putting together Bog People, a new collection of folk horror. My own contribution, Yellowbelly, also intersects with tech incrementalism but – I have no trouble admitting – pulls back from the brink. More dark parable, less dark night of the soul. A rail replacement bus to Scunthorpe is horror enough.
Bog People: A Working-Class Anthology of Folk Horror, edited by Hollie Starling, is published by Chatto & Windus.
Eric LaRocca
The Auctioneer by Joan Samson
Samson wrote only one novel in her lifetime. In a sharp, corrosive story that predates Stephen King’s masterpiece Needful Things or Shirley Jackson’s seminal The Lottery, The Auctioneer is a chilling descent into the hell of small-town madness as a result of greed and paranoia.
Set against the bucolic backdrop of a small community in the hills of New Hampshire, the story centres on a charismatic figure named Perly Dunsmore who arrives in the town of Harlowe and charms the unsuspecting townspeople into donating personal items for a community auction. As his grip on the community intensifies, Perly’s demands of the residents become more and more disconcerting. It is a wonderfully chilling meditation on the erosion of a close-knit community by an outsider with malevolent intentions.
I think what continues to disturb me about this novel is how so much of the horror is grounded in reality. There are no obvious supernatural elements at play. Instead, it’s centred around human cruelty and suffering.
We Are Always Tender With Our Dead by Eric LaRocca is published by Titan.
Intan Paramaditha
Urban legend
When I was a child in Indonesia, I heard an urban legend that terrified me: if you didn’t rinse and properly wrap your menstrual pad, a ghost would come for you. The story went that a girl once left her pad unwashed in a toilet. When she returned to fetch a forgotten ring, she found the door ajar. Inside squatted a woman with long black hair, her back to her. Slowly, she turned. A pale face, lips slick red – and in her hands, the girl’s unwashed pad. The ghost licked it clean.
That vision haunted me, but years later I understood it was more than a ghost story. It was also a lesson in shame, a way of disciplining girls’ bodies, teaching us that blood was dirty, dangerous, in need of secrecy.
It inspired me to write Blood, published in my collection Apple and Knife. In the story, the narrator must confront the same cautionary tale told by her Qur’an teacher. As an adult copywriter in Jakarta, she is tasked with selling sanitary pads by casting menstruation as monstrous. Memories of becoming a woman and the relentless policing of her body collide with a vision of the ghost who appears in the office toilet, licking menstrual blood.
Horror, for me, exposes how society treats women’s bodies as abject, shameful. Writing Blood was a way of reclaiming what had once made me afraid. The ghost still lingers, but now she walks beside me, her mouth red, her hunger reminding me of demonised, unruly, disobedient women.
Apple and Knife by Intan Paramaditha, translated by Stephen J Epstein, is published by Vintage Classics.
Paul Tremblay
Tiptoe by Laird Barron
Randall Vance is a photographer who grew up in the 1960s, the youngest of two children in an upper-middle class family. His enigmatic father, an engineer for IBM, liked to play a game called “tiptoe”. He would sneak up on his sons and pinch them. Sounds harmless enough, right? But his father never lost, never got caught, and the game represented his rather Darwinian philosophy that hinted at a secret ocean of menace. Maybe.
First appearing in the Shirley Jackson tribute anthology When Things Get Dark, Tiptoe works, on one level, as a clever homage tinged with the wicked wit and everyday weirdness of a Jackson tale. There’s fraught family dynamics that are quaint and deeply dysfunctional. There’s class anxiety mixed within the ugly spectre of American history. There’s even an eccentric aunt who makes believable claims to being psychic. While there is nothing expressly supernatural in the story and no scenes of explicit violence on the page, I’ve never had a story get under my skin in the way Tiptoe does. It picks at one of our oldest, hardwired fears, that of being the unwitting prey to a predator that we are not equipped to avoid.
Barron got my nervous leg twitching on the second page with “What I do know, is he was the kind of guy nobody saw coming.” It’s a chilling tone-setter to a story that becomes more ominous with every page. That line and all the unspoken hints and secrets are there, queuing up behind you, somewhere over your shoulder, there to see plainly if you only dare look. And in the last two breathtaking pages, Laird makes you look.
Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay is published by Titan.
CJ Tudor
Doctor Sleep by Stephen King
I spent most of my childhood being scared. I was scared of the dark, monsters, ghosts. I was scared of the derelict playground up the street, the house opposite where someone killed themselves. The list was long, random and inexhaustible.
Despite this, I was also attracted to creepy stuff. I would watch horror films at my friend Kirsty’s house and read any scary books I could get my hands on.
When I was trying to think of a book that scared me, I considered Stephen King – The Shining and Pet Sematary. But then I realised that those were books that had scared me as a kid. They didn’t hit so hard as an adult. Because your fears change.
That’s what brought me to Doctor Sleep. The sequel to The Shining was published in 2013, the same year I had my daughter. And as a parent your greatest fear is something happening to your child.
In Doctor Sleep the monsters of the book are the True Knot, a quasi-immortal group that hunts and kills children with the “shining”. Psychic vampires, they feed on the life force of their young victims. One of those victims is a young boy called Bradley Trevor who is abducted by the True Knot.
King never describes in detail what they do to Bradley, but one line always haunted me: “The boy lasted a long time. He screamed until his vocal cords ruptured and his cries became husky barks.”
I thought about that. A lot. My mind kept going back to it. Gnawing over it.
The Gathering by CJ Tudor is published by Penguin.
Alma Katsu
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
This is hands down the most realistic dystopian novel ever written. The unrelenting despair and undeniable reality of the world Cormac McCarthy has depicted will drive an icy spike of terror into your heart with every page. This will be us, your inner voice tells you, if the world doesn’t change.
Adding to the verisimilitude, I was on a road trip with my husband when we listened to the audiobook. I’d had a rough idea of what the novel was about but not the specifics. With every mile, as the story got bleaker, I waited for my husband to tell me “enough”. He’s not much for fiction, let alone anything as dark as this, but we listened to every word.
McCarthy does not tell us why civilisation ended, though – because the main characters are heading south to escape the killing winters, it’s been attributed to climate change. Does it really matter? A clever touch of the author’s is that the only characters you encounter are “have-nots”. There might be “haves” hunkered down on private islands stocked for survival, a truth for the modern day, but we don’t see them. The author knew, I think, that when the world has been laid to waste, through either stupidity or malice, you will only be a “have” for a matter of time. Time runs out for everyone, too late to see that we’re all in this together.
Fiend by Alma Katsu is published by Titan.
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