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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I read this narrative long ago and it has haunted me ever since. The so-called seasonal visitors turn out to be a family from New York, who lease the same isolated country cottage each year. On this occasion, instead of going back home, they decide to lengthen their vacation for a month longer – an action that appears to unsettle each resident in the adjacent village. All pass on an identical cryptic advice that nobody has remained at the lake beyond the end of summer. Nonetheless, they are resolved to remain, and at that point events begin to grow more bizarre. The individual who supplies oil refuses to sell for them. No one is willing to supply supplies to the cottage, and when they endeavor to go to the village, their vehicle refuses to operate. A storm gathers, the batteries within the device diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple clung to each other in their summer cottage and expected”. What could be the Allisons expecting? What might the townspeople understand? Every time I revisit the writer’s disturbing and inspiring story, I recall that the best horror stems from that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by a noted author

In this concise narrative two people go to a common beach community where church bells toll the whole time, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and inexplicable. The opening very scary episode occurs during the evening, when they decide to take a walk and they fail to see the sea. There’s sand, there is the odor of decaying seafood and seawater, surf is audible, but the water seems phantom, or a different entity and worse. It is truly deeply malevolent and each occasion I go to a beach after dark I think about this tale which spoiled the sea at night to my mind – favorably.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – head back to the hotel and discover the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of confinement, necro-orgy and death-and-the-maiden meets danse macabre bedlam. It’s a chilling reflection regarding craving and decay, two bodies aging together as spouses, the bond and violence and affection within wedlock.

Not just the most frightening, but perhaps a top example of concise narratives out there, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in Spanish, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to be released locally a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this book by a pool overseas a few years ago. Although it was sunny I felt an icy feeling over me. I also felt the excitement of fascination. I was writing my latest book, and I encountered a block. I wasn’t sure if there was an effective approach to craft some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I understood that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a dark flight through the mind of a murderer, the protagonist, modeled after a notorious figure, the criminal who murdered and mutilated 17 young men and boys in the Midwest over a decade. As is well-known, this person was consumed with creating a submissive individual who would never leave him and carried out several horrific efforts to do so.

The deeds the novel describes are terrible, but similarly terrifying is the psychological persuasiveness. The protagonist’s awful, broken reality is directly described with concise language, details omitted. The audience is plunged trapped in his consciousness, obliged to observe mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The alien nature of his thinking resembles a tangible impact – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Starting Zombie is not just reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from a gifted writer

When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and later started having night terrors. On one occasion, the terror involved a dream where I was trapped in a box and, upon awakening, I realized that I had ripped the slat from the window, attempting to escape. That house was decaying; when it rained heavily the entranceway filled with water, maggots came down from the roof onto the bed, and on one occasion a large rat scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

Once a companion presented me with the story, I had moved out in my childhood residence, but the narrative about the home perched on the cliffs felt familiar in my view, homesick as I felt. It is a book concerning a ghostly loud, sentimental building and a young woman who ingests limestone off the rocks. I loved the novel deeply and returned frequently to its pages, always finding {something