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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense

I discovered this narrative years ago and it has lingered with me from that moment. The titular “summer people” are a couple from New York, who lease an identical off-grid country cottage every summer. On this occasion, rather than returning home, they decide to extend their holiday a few more weeks – a decision that to alarm everyone in the nearby town. Each repeats the same veiled caution that nobody has lingered in the area past Labor Day. Even so, the Allisons are determined to stay, and at that point things start to get increasingly weird. The person who brings the kerosene declines to provide to the couple. Not a single person is willing to supply food to the cottage, and at the time they try to drive into town, their vehicle refuses to operate. A storm gathers, the energy in the radio diminish, and as darkness falls, “the two old people crowded closely in their summer cottage and expected”. What are the Allisons expecting? What could the townspeople understand? Whenever I peruse the writer’s disturbing and influential story, I’m reminded that the finest fright originates in that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by a noted author

In this brief tale a pair travel to a typical seaside town where bells ring constantly, a perpetual pealing that is annoying and inexplicable. The initial truly frightening scene takes place after dark, as they choose to go for a stroll and they fail to see the ocean. The beach is there, there is the odor of putrid marine life and salt, surf is audible, but the ocean seems phantom, or a different entity and even more alarming. It’s just deeply malevolent and every time I travel to the coast at night I think about this tale which spoiled the beach in the evening in my view – in a good way.

The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – head back to the hotel and discover the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and demise and innocence encounters dance of death pandemonium. It’s an unnerving reflection on desire and decline, two bodies maturing in tandem as spouses, the attachment and violence and gentleness in matrimony.

Not merely the most frightening, but likely a top example of short stories in existence, and a personal favourite. I read it en español, in the initial publication of these tales to appear in this country several years back.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I read Zombie beside the swimming area overseas in 2020. Although it was sunny I experienced an icy feeling within me. Additionally, I sensed the electricity of excitement. I was writing my latest book, and I encountered a block. I didn’t know if there was an effective approach to write certain terrifying elements the story includes. Reading Zombie, I saw that it could be done.

Published in 1995, the story is a bleak exploration through the mind of a young serial killer, the main character, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who killed and dismembered 17 young men and boys in a city during a specific period. As is well-known, this person was obsessed with making a submissive individual who would stay him and carried out several horrific efforts to do so.

The actions the novel describes are appalling, but similarly terrifying is its psychological persuasiveness. The character’s dreadful, shattered existence is plainly told with concise language, identities hidden. The reader is sunk deep stuck in his mind, obliged to see ideas and deeds that horrify. The alien nature of his thinking feels like a bodily jolt – or getting lost in an empty realm. Going into this story feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced suffering from bad dreams. Once, the horror featured a dream in which I was stuck inside a container and, upon awakening, I realized that I had removed the slat out of the window frame, attempting to escape. That home was crumbling; when it rained heavily the entranceway flooded, fly larvae came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and once a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in that space.

Once a companion presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the narrative regarding the building located on the coastline appeared known to me, homesick as I felt. It is a book featuring a possessed clamorous, emotional house and a female character who ingests chalk off the rocks. I adored the novel immensely and returned frequently to it, consistently uncovering {something