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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I discovered this tale years ago and it has stayed with me since then. The named “summer people” happen to be the Allisons from New York, who occupy a particular isolated rural cabin each year. This time, instead of returning to urban life, they choose to lengthen their holiday an extra month – something that seems to disturb everyone in the nearby town. Each repeats a similar vague warning that nobody has remained by the water past Labor Day. Even so, the Allisons insist to not leave, and that is the moment situations commence to get increasingly weird. The man who delivers the kerosene won’t sell for them. Not a single person will deliver groceries to the cabin, and as they endeavor to travel to the community, the automobile refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the batteries of their radio fade, and as darkness falls, “the two old people clung to each other within their rental and expected”. What could be the Allisons expecting? What do the locals know? Every time I revisit this author’s disturbing and influential story, I recall that the best horror comes from what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by a noted author

In this concise narrative a pair go to an ordinary coastal village in which chimes sound the whole time, a constant chiming that is annoying and unexplainable. The opening truly frightening moment occurs at night, at the time they decide to walk around and they fail to see the ocean. Sand is present, there is the odor of rotting fish and brine, there are waves, but the sea appears spectral, or another thing and worse. It is simply insanely sinister and whenever I travel to a beach at night I think about this tale that ruined the ocean after dark for me – in a good way.

The recent spouses – the wife is youthful, he’s not – head back to the hotel and learn why the bells ring, in a long sequence of confinement, necro-orgy and death-and-the-maiden encounters dance of death pandemonium. It is a disturbing meditation on desire and deterioration, two people maturing in tandem as partners, the attachment and aggression and tenderness of marriage.

Not only the most frightening, but perhaps one of the best concise narratives available, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to be published in this country in 2011.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I read this narrative by a pool overseas in 2020. Although it was sunny I experienced a chill within me. Additionally, I sensed the electricity of fascination. I was working on a new project, and I faced a wall. I didn’t know if it was possible an effective approach to compose some of the fearful things the story includes. Going through this book, I realized that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a dark flight into the thoughts of a young serial killer, the protagonist, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who killed and mutilated 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee during a specific period. As is well-known, Dahmer was obsessed with creating a compliant victim that would remain by his side and carried out several horrific efforts to accomplish it.

The actions the story tells are terrible, but equally frightening is the psychological persuasiveness. The character’s terrible, fragmented world is directly described with concise language, identities hidden. The reader is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, forced to see ideas and deeds that horrify. The alien nature of his thinking feels like a tangible impact – or finding oneself isolated on a desolate planet. Going into Zombie is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from a gifted writer

When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and eventually began having night terrors. At one point, the horror involved a nightmare where I was confined within an enclosure and, upon awakening, I realized that I had removed a piece off the window, seeking to leave. That building was falling apart; when it rained heavily the ground floor corridor became inundated, insect eggs came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and once a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

When a friend handed me this author’s book, I had moved out with my parents, but the story of the house high on the Dover cliffs appeared known to myself, longing as I was. It’s a novel featuring a possessed clamorous, atmospheric home and a female character who ingests limestone from the shoreline. I adored the book immensely and came back again and again to its pages, each time discovering {something