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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I encountered this narrative long ago and it has stayed with me since then. The named seasonal visitors turn out to be a couple from New York, who lease a particular remote lakeside house each year. This time, rather than returning to urban life, they decide to extend their holiday an extra month – something that seems to alarm all the locals in the nearby town. Each repeats the same veiled caution that no one has remained in the area beyond the holiday. Even so, they are resolved to not leave, and that’s when events begin to get increasingly weird. The person who supplies the kerosene won’t sell for them. Not a single person agrees to bring food to the cottage, and as the Allisons endeavor to drive into town, the car won’t start. A storm gathers, the energy of their radio diminish, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals huddled together in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What are this couple anticipating? What might the townspeople understand? Each occasion I read Jackson’s disturbing and thought-provoking narrative, I recall that the best horror originates in the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from a noted author

In this concise narrative two people travel to a typical coastal village where bells ring constantly, an incessant ringing that is irritating and puzzling. The first truly frightening moment occurs at night, when they decide to walk around and they fail to see the ocean. The beach is there, the scent exists of decaying seafood and salt, waves crash, but the water appears spectral, or another thing and more dreadful. It is truly insanely sinister and whenever I go to a beach in the evening I think about this tale that destroyed the ocean after dark to my mind – favorably.

The recent spouses – the wife is youthful, he’s not – return to the inn and discover the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and death-and-the-maiden encounters danse macabre chaos. It’s an unnerving contemplation on desire and decay, a pair of individuals aging together as a couple, the attachment and brutality and affection of marriage.

Not only the most terrifying, but perhaps among the finest short stories available, and a personal favourite. I read it in Spanish, in the debut release of Aickman stories to appear locally in 2011.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I perused this narrative near the water overseas in 2020. Despite the sunshine I experienced a chill over me. Additionally, I sensed the thrill of anticipation. I was writing my third novel, and I faced a wall. I wasn’t sure whether there existed an effective approach to compose some of the fearful things the book contains. Reading Zombie, I saw that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the novel is a grim journey within the psyche of a young serial killer, the main character, based on a notorious figure, the serial killer who killed and cut apart numerous individuals in a city during a specific period. Notoriously, Dahmer was consumed with making a zombie sex slave that would remain him and attempted numerous macabre trials to achieve this.

The actions the story tells are terrible, but equally frightening is its own mental realism. Quentin P’s dreadful, broken reality is directly described using minimal words, names redacted. The reader is plunged trapped in his consciousness, compelled to witness mental processes and behaviors that shock. The foreignness of his thinking is like a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated on a desolate planet. Starting this story is less like reading than a full body experience. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

In my early years, I walked in my sleep and subsequently commenced experiencing nightmares. At one point, the terror included a nightmare where I was trapped in a box and, upon awakening, I found that I had ripped a part out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That home was decaying; when it rained heavily the ground floor corridor flooded, insect eggs fell from the ceiling onto the bed, and once a big rodent ascended the window coverings in my sister’s room.

After an acquaintance gave me this author’s book, I had moved out with my parents, but the tale about the home perched on the cliffs felt familiar to me, homesick as I was. It’s a book featuring a possessed clamorous, sentimental building and a girl who eats limestone from the cliffs. I loved the book deeply and went back repeatedly to its pages, always finding {something