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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I read this story some time back and it has lingered with me ever since. The so-called seasonal visitors turn out to be a couple urban dwellers, who lease an identical off-grid country cottage each year. During this visit, instead of returning to the city, they decide to extend their holiday a few more weeks – something that seems to disturb each resident in the surrounding community. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that no one has lingered in the area past Labor Day. Even so, they insist to not leave, and that’s when events begin to get increasingly weird. The individual who delivers the kerosene won’t sell for them. No one is willing to supply food to the cottage, and when the Allisons attempt to go to the village, the automobile fails to start. A storm gathers, the batteries in the radio die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people crowded closely within their rental and waited”. What are they anticipating? What do the townspeople be aware of? Each occasion I revisit the writer’s disturbing and thought-provoking narrative, I’m reminded that the top terror stems from what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes from a noted author

In this brief tale two people journey to a common beach community in which chimes sound the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and inexplicable. The initial extremely terrifying episode takes place after dark, as they opt to go for a stroll and they can’t find the sea. There’s sand, there is the odor of decaying seafood and brine, waves crash, but the sea seems phantom, or another thing and more dreadful. It is simply insanely sinister and whenever I go to the coast in the evening I remember this story that destroyed the beach in the evening to my mind – favorably.

The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – head back to the hotel and learn why the bells ring, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and death-and-the-maiden intersects with dance of death bedlam. It’s a chilling meditation regarding craving and deterioration, a pair of individuals growing old jointly as partners, the connection and aggression and gentleness of marriage.

Not merely the most terrifying, but perhaps among the finest concise narratives out there, and a personal favourite. I read it en español, in the first edition of this author’s works to be published locally several years back.

Catriona Ward

Zombie from an esteemed writer

I read Zombie beside the swimming area in France in 2020. Although it was sunny I felt cold creep within me. I also felt the electricity of anticipation. I was working on my third novel, and I encountered a block. I was uncertain if there was an effective approach to craft certain terrifying elements the book contains. Going through this book, I saw that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a grim journey into the thoughts of a criminal, Quentin P, based on a notorious figure, the serial killer who murdered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, Dahmer was consumed with creating a compliant victim who would stay with him and made many macabre trials to achieve this.

The deeds the novel describes are horrific, but equally frightening is its mental realism. Quentin P’s awful, shattered existence is directly described in spare prose, identities hidden. The audience is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, obliged to witness mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The alien nature of his psyche is like a bodily jolt – or being stranded in an empty realm. Starting Zombie feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the terror included a nightmare during which I was trapped in a box and, when I woke up, I realized that I had torn off a piece out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That home was decaying; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall flooded, insect eggs fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and at one time a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in the bedroom.

After an acquaintance presented me with the story, I had moved out at my family home, but the story about the home high on the Dover cliffs appeared known to me, nostalgic as I felt. It’s a story about a haunted noisy, sentimental building and a girl who consumes limestone from the cliffs. I loved the story so much and went back frequently to its pages, each time discovering {something