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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I encountered this tale years ago and it has lingered with me ever since. The so-called vacationers turn out to be the Allisons from New York, who occupy a particular off-grid lakeside house every summer. On this occasion, instead of heading back home, they decide to lengthen their stay a few more weeks – a decision that to disturb each resident in the surrounding community. All pass on a similar vague warning that not a soul has ever stayed in the area beyond the holiday. Even so, the Allisons are determined to remain, and at that point situations commence to grow more bizarre. The person who brings oil refuses to sell for them. No one will deliver supplies to the cottage, and at the time they endeavor to drive into town, their vehicle fails to start. A storm gathers, the batteries within the device die, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple crowded closely within their rental and expected”. What might be this couple anticipating? What could the locals understand? Whenever I revisit the writer’s chilling and thought-provoking tale, I recall that the best horror originates in the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a couple go to a typical beach community where church bells toll the whole time, an incessant ringing that is irritating and inexplicable. The initial extremely terrifying moment takes place at night, at the time they choose to walk around and they fail to see the ocean. Sand is present, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and seawater, waves crash, but the sea appears spectral, or another thing and worse. It is simply deeply malevolent and every time I travel to the coast in the evening I think about this narrative which spoiled the sea at night in my view – positively.

The newlyweds – she’s very young, the man is mature – go back to the inn and discover the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and demise and innocence encounters grim ballet bedlam. It’s an unnerving meditation on desire and decay, a pair of individuals growing old jointly as a couple, the attachment and aggression and tenderness in matrimony.

Not just the scariest, but perhaps among the finest short stories in existence, and a beloved choice. I encountered it in Spanish, in the debut release of these tales to be released in this country in 2011.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this narrative beside the swimming area in the French countryside in 2020. Even with the bright weather I sensed an icy feeling over me. Additionally, I sensed the electricity of excitement. I was composing my latest book, and I encountered a block. I didn’t know if there was any good way to write some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Experiencing this novel, I understood that it could be done.

Published in 1995, the book is a dark flight through the mind of a criminal, the protagonist, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who slaughtered and cut apart multiple victims in a city during a specific period. Infamously, this person was consumed with producing a zombie sex slave that would remain by his side and made many macabre trials to achieve this.

The actions the story tells are horrific, but similarly terrifying is its own psychological persuasiveness. The protagonist’s awful, fragmented world is plainly told using minimal words, details omitted. The reader is immersed stuck in his mind, obliged to witness mental processes and behaviors that shock. The strangeness of his mind feels like a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated on a desolate planet. Going into this book is not just reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the fear involved a dream during which I was confined within an enclosure and, upon awakening, I realized that I had torn off a part off the window, trying to get out. That home was decaying; when storms came the downstairs hall flooded, maggots came down from the roof onto the bed, and on one occasion a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in that space.

Once a companion presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere in my childhood residence, but the narrative of the house high on the Dover cliffs appeared known to myself, nostalgic as I was. It is a book concerning a ghostly clamorous, emotional house and a girl who ingests chalk off the rocks. I adored the story deeply and went back repeatedly to the story, always finding {something