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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson

I read this story long ago and it has lingered with me since then. The named “summer people” happen to be a couple urban dwellers, who rent the same off-grid rural cabin every summer. On this occasion, instead of heading back home, they choose to prolong their vacation for a month longer – something that seems to disturb everyone in the surrounding community. Each repeats an identical cryptic advice that nobody has remained at the lake past Labor Day. Even so, the Allisons insist to stay, and that is the moment events begin to grow more bizarre. The man who supplies the kerosene refuses to sell to the couple. Not a single person will deliver supplies to the cabin, and when the family attempt to travel to the community, the car fails to start. A tempest builds, the power of their radio fade, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple clung to each other in their summer cottage and waited”. What might be they expecting? What do the residents be aware of? Whenever I revisit the writer’s unnerving and inspiring narrative, I’m reminded that the finest fright originates in what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a couple journey to an ordinary seaside town in which chimes sound the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and puzzling. The initial very scary moment happens after dark, as they choose to go for a stroll and they can’t find the ocean. The beach is there, the scent exists of decaying seafood and seawater, surf is audible, but the ocean appears spectral, or something else and even more alarming. It is simply deeply malevolent and whenever I travel to the shore at night I recall this tale that destroyed the sea at night for me – favorably.

The young couple – she’s very young, he’s not – go back to their lodging and discover the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of confinement, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden meets grim ballet chaos. It’s a chilling reflection regarding craving and decay, two people maturing in tandem as partners, the connection and violence and tenderness within wedlock.

Not just the most frightening, but likely among the finest concise narratives in existence, and an individual preference. I experienced it en español, in the initial publication of these tales to be published locally a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates

I perused Zombie near the water in the French countryside in 2020. Despite the sunshine I experienced a chill over me. I also experienced the thrill of excitement. I was working on a new project, and I had hit an obstacle. I didn’t know if there was any good way to craft certain terrifying elements the story includes. Going through this book, I realized that it was possible.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a grim journey into the thoughts of a young serial killer, Quentin P, modeled after an infamous individual, the murderer who killed and cut apart numerous individuals in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, the killer was consumed with making a compliant victim who would stay him and attempted numerous horrific efforts to do so.

The acts the book depicts are appalling, but equally frightening is its own mental realism. Quentin P’s dreadful, fragmented world is directly described in spare prose, identities hidden. The audience is plunged trapped in his consciousness, obliged to observe thoughts and actions that appal. The strangeness of his thinking feels like a physical shock – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Entering Zombie is not just reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I sleepwalked and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the fear included a nightmare in which I was confined in a box and, when I woke up, I found that I had ripped a piece off the window, trying to get out. That building was decaying; when storms came the ground floor corridor filled with water, fly larvae came down from the roof into the bedroom, and at one time a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in that space.

When a friend handed me the story, I had moved out in my childhood residence, but the narrative of the house high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to myself, longing as I felt. It’s a novel featuring a possessed loud, sentimental building and a female character who eats limestone from the cliffs. I adored the story deeply and returned repeatedly to its pages, consistently uncovering {something