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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson

I encountered this narrative years ago and it has stayed with me ever since. The titular “summer people” turn out to be a family urban dwellers, who rent the same off-grid lakeside house every summer. On this occasion, in place of heading back home, they choose to extend their stay an extra month – something that seems to disturb each resident in the surrounding community. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that no one has lingered in the area past the end of summer. Nonetheless, they are resolved to remain, and at that point situations commence to grow more bizarre. The individual who brings oil won’t sell to the couple. No one is willing to supply food to their home, and at the time they attempt to drive into town, the car won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the energy of their radio die, and when night comes, “the two old people huddled together inside their cabin and waited”. What are this couple expecting? What might the locals know? Whenever I revisit this author’s disturbing and inspiring tale, I’m reminded that the best horror stems from what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a pair journey to an ordinary coastal village in which chimes sound constantly, a perpetual pealing that is irritating and unexplainable. The opening extremely terrifying moment occurs during the evening, as they opt to take a walk and they are unable to locate the ocean. There’s sand, the scent exists of putrid marine life and brine, there are waves, but the ocean seems phantom, or another thing and more dreadful. It’s just profoundly ominous and each occasion I visit to a beach in the evening I think about this tale that destroyed the ocean after dark in my view – positively.

The newlyweds – the woman is adolescent, the husband is older – return to the hotel and learn the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth encounters danse macabre chaos. It’s an unnerving contemplation on desire and deterioration, two people aging together as partners, the attachment and aggression and tenderness of marriage.

Not merely the most frightening, but probably among the finest short stories in existence, and a beloved choice. I read it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of these tales to be released locally a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from an esteemed writer

I perused this narrative beside the swimming area in the French countryside a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I experienced an icy feeling through me. Additionally, I sensed the electricity of anticipation. I was writing a new project, and I encountered a block. I didn’t know if there was any good way to write some of the fearful things the book contains. Reading Zombie, I realized that it could be done.

Published in 1995, the novel is a dark flight within the psyche of a criminal, Quentin P, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who murdered and cut apart 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, Dahmer was consumed with producing a compliant victim who would stay by his side and attempted numerous macabre trials to achieve this.

The actions the story tells are appalling, but similarly terrifying is its own psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s awful, fragmented world is directly described using minimal words, names redacted. The audience is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, obliged to observe mental processes and behaviors that appal. The strangeness of his mind feels like a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Entering this book feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I walked in my sleep and eventually began experiencing nightmares. Once, the horror involved a nightmare where I was stuck inside a container and, as I roused, I discovered that I had removed a part from the window, seeking to leave. That home was decaying; when it rained heavily the entranceway filled with water, fly larvae dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and at one time a sizeable vermin climbed the drapes in the bedroom.

Once a companion presented me with the story, I was no longer living in my childhood residence, but the narrative of the house high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to me, homesick at that time. It is a book featuring a possessed noisy, atmospheric home and a female character who ingests chalk from the cliffs. I loved the book so much and came back frequently to it, always finding {something