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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by a master of suspense

I encountered this narrative long ago and it has haunted me since then. The titular seasonal visitors happen to be a family urban dwellers, who rent the same off-grid rural cabin every summer. This time, rather than heading back to urban life, they opt to extend their stay a few more weeks – an action that appears to unsettle all the locals in the surrounding community. All pass on an identical cryptic advice that no one has ever stayed by the water beyond the holiday. Regardless, the Allisons are resolved to not leave, and that is the moment situations commence to become stranger. The man who supplies fuel won’t sell for them. Nobody agrees to bring supplies to the cottage, and as the Allisons attempt to drive into town, the car refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the power within the device fade, and when night comes, “the aged individuals huddled together within their rental and anticipated”. What could be they expecting? What could the townspeople know? Whenever I peruse this author’s disturbing and inspiring narrative, I’m reminded that the finest fright originates in the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this brief tale two people travel to an ordinary seaside town where bells ring the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is annoying and inexplicable. The opening very scary scene occurs after dark, when they choose to walk around and they fail to see the ocean. Sand is present, there is the odor of putrid marine life and salt, waves crash, but the sea appears spectral, or something else and more dreadful. It is simply deeply malevolent and every time I visit to the shore in the evening I remember this narrative that destroyed the sea at night for me – favorably.

The young couple – she’s very young, the man is mature – go back to the inn and learn why the bells ring, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden encounters danse macabre pandemonium. It’s an unnerving meditation on desire and decline, two bodies maturing in tandem as spouses, the connection and aggression and tenderness in matrimony.

Not merely the scariest, but perhaps among the finest brief tales available, and a beloved choice. I experienced it en español, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to be published locally several years back.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I read Zombie by a pool in the French countryside in 2020. Even with the bright weather I experienced cold creep through me. Additionally, I sensed the excitement of excitement. I was composing my third novel, and I encountered a wall. I didn’t know whether there existed a proper method to write certain terrifying elements the book contains. Going through this book, I realized that there was a way.

Published in 1995, the story is a bleak exploration within the psyche of a young serial killer, the main character, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who slaughtered and cut apart multiple victims in a city between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, the killer was consumed with creating a compliant victim who would never leave with him and carried out several horrific efforts to do so.

The actions the story tells are appalling, but equally frightening is the psychological persuasiveness. The character’s terrible, fragmented world is directly described using minimal words, names redacted. You is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, compelled to witness thoughts and actions that horrify. The foreignness of his psyche is like a physical shock – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Going into this story feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from a gifted writer

When I was a child, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced experiencing nightmares. Once, the horror included a vision during which I was stuck within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I realized that I had removed the slat off the window, trying to get out. That house was decaying; when storms came the ground floor corridor flooded, fly larvae came down from the roof into the bedroom, and on one occasion a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in that space.

Once a companion gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere in my childhood residence, but the story about the home located on the coastline seemed recognizable to myself, longing at that time. This is a story about a haunted noisy, atmospheric home and a girl who eats chalk from the cliffs. I adored the story immensely and went back frequently to its pages, consistently uncovering {something