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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I encountered this narrative years ago and it has stayed with me since then. The named seasonal visitors are a couple urban dwellers, who rent the same off-grid rural cabin every summer. This time, in place of heading back to urban life, they decide to lengthen their holiday a few more weeks – a decision that to alarm each resident in the nearby town. All pass on the same veiled caution that not a soul has remained in the area past Labor Day. Nonetheless, the couple are resolved to not leave, and that is the moment situations commence to get increasingly weird. The person who brings fuel refuses to sell for them. Not a single person is willing to supply supplies to the cottage, and as the Allisons try to drive into town, the car won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the power in the radio die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the aged individuals huddled together in their summer cottage and expected”. What might be they waiting for? What do the locals know? Each occasion I peruse the writer’s disturbing and thought-provoking narrative, I recall that the top terror stems from that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this short story two people travel to an ordinary beach community in which chimes sound constantly, a constant chiming that is annoying and unexplainable. The initial truly frightening episode happens during the evening, at the time they choose to go for a stroll and they can’t find the sea. Sand is present, there’s the smell of rotting fish and seawater, there are waves, but the ocean appears spectral, or another thing and even more alarming. It is truly insanely sinister and every time I visit to the coast at night I remember this narrative that destroyed the beach in the evening to my mind – favorably.

The newlyweds – the wife is youthful, the husband is older – return to the inn and learn the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of confinement, necro-orgy and death-and-the-maiden encounters danse macabre chaos. It’s a chilling meditation about longing and deterioration, two people maturing in tandem as a couple, the attachment and violence and gentleness in matrimony.

Not merely the most terrifying, but likely among the finest short stories available, and a beloved choice. I experienced it en español, in the first edition of these tales to appear locally several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this narrative near the water in France recently. Although it was sunny I sensed cold creep over me. I also felt the electricity of excitement. I was working on my latest book, and I had hit a wall. I was uncertain if it was possible an effective approach to write certain terrifying elements the book contains. Reading Zombie, I realized that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the novel is a bleak exploration through the mind of a criminal, the main character, based on an infamous individual, the serial killer who slaughtered and dismembered multiple victims in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, Dahmer was fixated with making a compliant victim who would stay him and attempted numerous macabre trials to do so.

The acts the book depicts are horrific, but similarly terrifying is its psychological persuasiveness. The character’s dreadful, fragmented world is simply narrated using minimal words, names redacted. The audience is immersed caught in his thoughts, obliged to observe ideas and deeds that horrify. The strangeness of his thinking is like a tangible impact – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Going into Zombie feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I was a somnambulist and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the fear included a vision where I was trapped inside a container and, when I woke up, I found that I had removed the slat out of the window frame, trying to get out. That building was falling apart; during heavy rain the downstairs hall flooded, fly larvae fell from the ceiling onto the bed, and once a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in my sister’s room.

When a friend gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere at my family home, but the narrative of the house high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to myself, nostalgic as I felt. It is a book concerning a ghostly loud, sentimental building and a girl who consumes limestone from the cliffs. I adored the story immensely and came back frequently to it, consistently uncovering {something