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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I encountered this tale years ago and it has lingered with me since then. The titular “summer people” are a couple urban dwellers, who rent an identical isolated rural cabin each year. This time, in place of heading back home, they decide to extend their vacation for a month longer – something that seems to unsettle each resident in the adjacent village. All pass on the same veiled caution that no one has ever stayed by the water past Labor Day. Even so, they are resolved to not leave, and that’s when events begin to become stranger. The person who supplies the kerosene declines to provide to them. No one will deliver supplies to the cottage, and at the time the Allisons endeavor to drive into town, their vehicle fails to start. A tempest builds, the power of their radio fade, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals clung to each other inside their cabin and waited”. What might be the Allisons anticipating? What do the locals know? Whenever I read this author’s disturbing and influential story, I’m reminded that the top terror originates in that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a couple travel to an ordinary seaside town in which chimes sound the whole time, a constant chiming that is annoying and unexplainable. The opening extremely terrifying episode takes place after dark, at the time they decide to take a walk and they fail to see the ocean. Sand is present, there’s the smell of rotting fish and salt, there are waves, but the ocean appears spectral, or something else and worse. It is simply deeply malevolent and every time I go to the shore at night I remember this tale that destroyed the ocean after dark in my view – in a good way.

The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, he’s not – go back to their lodging and learn the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and mortality and youth meets grim ballet chaos. It’s a chilling reflection regarding craving and decline, two people aging together as a couple, the connection and brutality and gentleness in matrimony.

Not only the most frightening, but perhaps one of the best concise narratives out there, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in Spanish, in the first edition of Aickman stories to appear in this country several years back.

Catriona Ward

Zombie from an esteemed writer

I read this book by a pool in France a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I sensed a chill over me. Additionally, I sensed the excitement of anticipation. I was writing my third novel, and I faced a block. I wasn’t sure if it was possible an effective approach to write various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Going through this book, I realized that there was a way.

Published in 1995, the book is a dark flight through the mind of a murderer, the protagonist, inspired by an infamous individual, the serial killer who murdered and mutilated numerous individuals in the Midwest over a decade. As is well-known, Dahmer was consumed with producing a compliant victim who would stay with him and attempted numerous horrific efforts to accomplish it.

The deeds the novel describes are horrific, but similarly terrifying is its own mental realism. Quentin P’s awful, broken reality is simply narrated with concise language, names redacted. You is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, compelled to see mental processes and behaviors that shock. The alien nature of his thinking resembles a physical shock – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Starting Zombie feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I sleepwalked and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the horror featured a vision where I was stuck in a box and, as I roused, I realized that I had ripped a part out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That house was falling apart; when storms came the downstairs hall flooded, insect eggs dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and once a big rodent ascended the window coverings in my sister’s room.

Once a companion handed me this author’s book, I was no longer living with my parents, but the narrative of the house located on the coastline appeared known to myself, nostalgic as I felt. It’s a novel featuring a possessed clamorous, sentimental building and a girl who eats calcium from the cliffs. I loved the book deeply and came back again and again to it, each time discovering {something