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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from a master of suspense

I encountered this tale years ago and it has haunted me from that moment. The so-called seasonal visitors happen to be a family from New York, who occupy an identical isolated rural cabin annually. This time, rather than returning home, they choose to extend their holiday an extra month – something that seems to unsettle all the locals in the adjacent village. Each repeats a similar vague warning that no one has ever stayed at the lake beyond Labor Day. Regardless, the Allisons insist to not leave, and that’s when events begin to become stranger. The man who supplies fuel won’t sell to the couple. No one will deliver food to the cabin, and when the family endeavor to go to the village, the car refuses to operate. A storm gathers, the batteries in the radio die, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple huddled together within their rental and anticipated”. What might be they waiting for? What do the locals know? Each occasion I read Jackson’s chilling and influential story, I recall that the best horror originates in that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by a noted author

In this concise narrative a pair go to an ordinary coastal village where church bells toll continuously, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and unexplainable. The first extremely terrifying moment occurs at night, at the time they opt to take a walk and they can’t find the water. The beach is there, the scent exists of putrid marine life and seawater, surf is audible, but the sea is a ghost, or something else and even more alarming. It is simply insanely sinister and every time I travel to the shore in the evening I remember this narrative that ruined the sea at night to my mind – positively.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – return to the inn and learn the reason for the chiming, during a prolonged scene of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and death-and-the-maiden intersects with danse macabre bedlam. It is a disturbing meditation on desire and decay, two bodies growing old jointly as a couple, the connection and aggression and tenderness in matrimony.

Not only the most frightening, but probably a top example of short stories available, and a beloved choice. I encountered it in Spanish, in the first edition of Aickman stories to be published in Argentina several years back.

Catriona Ward

Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into Zombie near the water overseas recently. Even with the bright weather I experienced an icy feeling through me. I also experienced the electricity of excitement. I was working on a new project, and I faced an obstacle. I was uncertain whether there existed an effective approach to compose various frightening aspects the book contains. Reading Zombie, I realized that it was possible.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a dark flight within the psyche of a murderer, the main character, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who slaughtered and mutilated numerous individuals in a city over a decade. Notoriously, this person 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 appalling, but just as scary is the emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s terrible, broken reality is simply narrated in spare prose, identities hidden. The audience is sunk deep stuck in his mind, compelled to observe thoughts and actions that shock. The alien nature of his mind feels like a tangible impact – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Starting Zombie is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from a gifted writer

During my youth, I walked in my sleep and later started having night terrors. Once, the horror involved a dream where I was trapped in a box and, upon awakening, I realized that I had removed the slat off the window, attempting to escape. That house was decaying; when it rained heavily the ground floor corridor filled with water, fly larvae fell from the ceiling onto the bed, and once a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

When a friend presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living at my family home, but the tale about the home high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to me, homesick as I was. It’s a novel concerning a ghostly noisy, emotional house and a young woman who eats calcium from the shoreline. I loved the story so much and returned frequently to the story, consistently uncovering {something