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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense

I discovered this narrative years ago and it has haunted me since then. The named “summer people” turn out to be a couple urban dwellers, who occupy an identical off-grid rural cabin annually. On this occasion, rather than returning home, they decide to lengthen their stay an extra month – something that seems to unsettle each resident in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that no one has ever stayed at the lake after the holiday. Regardless, they insist to remain, and that is the moment things start to grow more bizarre. The man who delivers the kerosene refuses to sell to them. Not a single person is willing to supply supplies to the cabin, and when the Allisons attempt to drive into town, the car refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the energy of their radio fade, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple huddled together in their summer cottage and expected”. What are this couple waiting for? What might the townspeople know? Each occasion I peruse the writer’s unnerving and inspiring narrative, I’m reminded that the finest fright stems from that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a couple go to an ordinary coastal village where bells ring the whole time, an incessant ringing that is irritating and puzzling. The first extremely terrifying moment takes place at night, at the time they opt to take a walk and they fail to see the ocean. There’s sand, there is the odor of decaying seafood and salt, there are waves, but the sea appears spectral, or something else and more dreadful. It is truly insanely sinister and whenever I visit to the coast after dark I remember this narrative which spoiled the sea at night for me – in a good way.

The young couple – she’s very young, the husband is older – return to the inn and find out why the bells ring, through an extended episode of confinement, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden encounters dance of death pandemonium. It is a disturbing contemplation on desire and deterioration, two bodies growing old jointly as partners, the attachment and aggression and gentleness in matrimony.

Not merely the most terrifying, but perhaps a top example of brief tales out there, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in Spanish, in the initial publication of these tales to be published in this country a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I read this book near the water in the French countryside in 2020. Even with the bright weather I sensed a chill through me. Additionally, I sensed the electricity of fascination. I was writing my third novel, and I had hit a block. I wasn’t sure if it was possible a proper method to craft certain terrifying elements the story includes. Reading Zombie, I understood that there was a way.

Released decades ago, the book is a bleak exploration within the psyche of a murderer, the main character, modeled after an infamous individual, the murderer who murdered and cut apart multiple victims in the Midwest over a decade. As is well-known, this person was fixated with making a zombie sex slave who would stay by his side and attempted numerous grisly attempts to achieve this.

The acts the book depicts are appalling, but equally frightening is its mental realism. Quentin P’s awful, broken reality is plainly told in spare prose, names redacted. You is plunged trapped in his consciousness, forced to see mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The alien nature of his psyche feels like a tangible impact – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Starting this story is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I sleepwalked and later started having night terrors. On one occasion, the terror involved a dream during which I was stuck in a box and, upon awakening, I realized that I had torn off a part off the window, seeking to leave. That house was falling apart; during heavy rain the downstairs hall flooded, maggots came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and at one time a large rat climbed the drapes in the bedroom.

Once a companion gave me this author’s book, I had moved out in my childhood residence, but the narrative about the home perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable to myself, nostalgic as I felt. It’s a story concerning a ghostly clamorous, sentimental building and a female character who consumes calcium from the shoreline. I adored the book deeply and came back repeatedly to it, always finding {something