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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by a master of suspense

I encountered this story years ago and it has lingered with me ever since. The so-called seasonal visitors happen to be a couple from the city, who lease a particular remote lakeside house each year. This time, in place of heading back to urban life, they opt to lengthen their holiday for a month longer – something that seems to unsettle all the locals in the adjacent village. All pass on a similar vague warning that nobody has ever stayed in the area past Labor Day. Nonetheless, the couple are resolved to remain, and at that point things start to get increasingly weird. The individual who brings oil refuses to sell to them. No one is willing to supply supplies to the cottage, and as the family endeavor to go to the village, the car refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the batteries in the radio fade, and when night comes, “the two old people huddled together within their rental and anticipated”. What could be the Allisons expecting? What do the residents understand? Every time I read the writer’s disturbing and inspiring narrative, I remember that the top terror stems from that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a couple go to a common seaside town where church bells toll constantly, a perpetual pealing that is annoying and inexplicable. The first very scary moment takes place after dark, as they decide to walk around and they fail to see the ocean. Sand is present, the scent exists of putrid marine life and salt, there are waves, but the ocean seems phantom, or a different entity and worse. It is truly insanely sinister and every time I go to the shore at night I think about this narrative that destroyed the ocean after dark for me – favorably.

The newlyweds – she’s very young, the husband is older – head back to their lodging and discover the cause of the ringing, during a prolonged scene of confinement, necro-orgy and death-and-the-maiden meets danse macabre pandemonium. It is a disturbing contemplation on desire and decline, two bodies aging together as partners, the attachment and aggression and tenderness of marriage.

Not just the most terrifying, but perhaps one of the best brief tales available, and a beloved choice. I experienced it en español, in the initial publication of these tales to be published locally a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this narrative beside the swimming area in France in 2020. Despite the sunshine I experienced a chill through me. Additionally, I sensed the electricity of fascination. I was writing my third novel, and I faced an obstacle. I didn’t know if it was possible any good way to write certain terrifying elements the story includes. Reading Zombie, I saw that it was possible.

Published in 1995, the book is a dark flight into the thoughts of a criminal, the main character, inspired by an infamous individual, the criminal who killed and dismembered multiple victims in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, the killer was obsessed with making a compliant victim who would stay him and made many grisly attempts to do so.

The acts the novel describes are horrific, but similarly terrifying is its own emotional authenticity. The character’s terrible, broken reality is directly described using minimal words, identities hidden. You is immersed stuck in his mind, forced to see thoughts and actions that shock. The foreignness of his psyche is like a bodily jolt – or getting lost on a desolate planet. Starting Zombie is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I sleepwalked and eventually began having night terrors. At one point, the horror involved a dream in which I was stuck within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I realized that I had torn off the slat from the window, attempting to escape. That building was decaying; during heavy rain the downstairs hall became inundated, maggots came down from the roof into the bedroom, and at one time a big rodent climbed the drapes in the bedroom.

When a friend presented me with this author’s book, I was residing elsewhere at my family home, but the story regarding the building perched on the cliffs felt familiar in my view, homesick as I was. It’s a story concerning a ghostly clamorous, sentimental building and a female character who consumes calcium off the rocks. I loved the book immensely and returned repeatedly to the story, each time discovering {something