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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from a master of suspense

I encountered this tale years ago and it has lingered with me ever since. The named vacationers turn out to be the Allisons urban dwellers, who lease a particular isolated lakeside house each year. This time, instead of going back to the city, they decide to extend their holiday a few more weeks – an action that appears to disturb each resident in the surrounding community. Each repeats an identical cryptic advice that not a soul has lingered in the area beyond Labor Day. Regardless, they are resolved to stay, and that is the moment events begin to become stranger. The individual who brings the kerosene refuses to sell to the couple. Nobody will deliver groceries to the cabin, and as the Allisons attempt to drive into town, their vehicle refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the energy in the radio diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the aged individuals crowded closely inside their cabin and expected”. What might be this couple waiting for? What could the townspeople know? Whenever I peruse Jackson’s disturbing and influential tale, I’m reminded that the top terror stems from the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this brief tale two people travel to a common seaside town where bells ring constantly, a perpetual pealing that is irritating and puzzling. The first truly frightening scene happens at night, at the time they choose to walk around and they can’t find the water. The beach is there, the scent exists of rotting fish and brine, surf is audible, but the sea appears spectral, or a different entity and even more alarming. It’s just insanely sinister and whenever I visit to a beach at night I think about this tale which spoiled the sea at night in my view – positively.

The young couple – the woman is adolescent, he’s not – return to the hotel and learn the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth meets dance of death chaos. It’s a chilling reflection about longing and decay, two people growing old jointly as a couple, the bond and aggression and affection of marriage.

Not just the most terrifying, but likely among the finest short stories available, and a personal favourite. I read it en español, in the first edition of this author’s works to appear in Argentina several years back.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this book by a pool overseas recently. Even with the bright weather I felt an icy feeling within me. Additionally, I sensed the thrill of fascination. I was composing my latest book, and I had hit a block. I didn’t know if there was a proper method to compose various frightening aspects the book contains. Reading Zombie, I realized that there was a way.

Published in 1995, the book is a dark flight through the mind of a criminal, the protagonist, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who slaughtered and cut apart multiple victims in a city between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, Dahmer was fixated with making a compliant victim that would remain with him and attempted numerous grisly attempts to do so.

The deeds the story tells are horrific, but similarly terrifying is its own psychological persuasiveness. The character’s awful, shattered existence is simply narrated with concise language, identities hidden. The audience is immersed stuck in his mind, compelled to witness ideas and deeds that horrify. The foreignness of his psyche resembles a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Entering this book is less like reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel by a gifted writer

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. Once, the fear involved a nightmare during which I was confined within an enclosure and, as I roused, I discovered that I had torn off the slat from the window, trying to get out. That house was crumbling; during heavy rain the entranceway became inundated, fly larvae dropped from above onto the bed, and at one time a big rodent ascended the window coverings in my sister’s room.

After an acquaintance gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out with my parents, but the tale of the house high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to me, homesick as I felt. This is a novel concerning a ghostly loud, atmospheric home and a girl who ingests limestone from the shoreline. I adored the book immensely and went back frequently to its pages, consistently uncovering {something