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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I discovered this story some time back and it has haunted me from that moment. The titular “summer people” happen to be a couple urban dwellers, who rent the same isolated country cottage each year. On this occasion, instead of returning to urban life, they opt to extend their holiday for a month longer – something that seems to disturb each resident in the surrounding community. All pass on the same veiled caution that no one has ever stayed by the water after the holiday. Even so, the couple insist to stay, and that’s when events begin to become stranger. The man who brings fuel declines to provide to them. No one is willing to supply food to the cabin, and at the time the family try to drive into town, their vehicle won’t start. A storm gathers, the batteries within the device fade, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple crowded closely inside their cabin and waited”. What could be this couple waiting for? What do the residents be aware of? Every time I peruse Jackson’s unnerving and thought-provoking narrative, I’m reminded that the best horror originates in the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from a noted author

In this concise narrative a pair travel to a typical seaside town in which chimes sound the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and unexplainable. The first truly frightening moment takes place at night, as they opt to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the water. The beach is there, there is the odor of putrid marine life and salt, there are waves, but the water is a ghost, or something else and even more alarming. It is truly profoundly ominous and whenever I travel to the coast at night I remember this narrative that ruined the ocean after dark for me – favorably.

The newlyweds – the woman is adolescent, he’s not – return to the hotel and discover the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and mortality and youth intersects with grim ballet chaos. It’s a chilling meditation regarding craving and decay, two bodies aging together as partners, the bond and brutality and affection in matrimony.

Not just the scariest, but likely one of the best short stories in existence, and a personal favourite. I read it in Spanish, in the debut release of this author’s works to be published locally several years back.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I read this book beside the swimming area in the French countryside in 2020. Despite the sunshine I experienced a chill within me. Additionally, I sensed the thrill of excitement. I was working on a new project, and I had hit a block. I didn’t know if it was possible a proper method to compose certain terrifying elements the book contains. Experiencing this novel, I understood that it could be done.

Published in 1995, the novel is a dark flight within the psyche of a murderer, the main character, modeled after a notorious figure, the serial killer who murdered and dismembered numerous individuals in a city over a decade. Infamously, this person was fixated with making a compliant victim who would never leave with him and attempted numerous macabre trials to achieve this.

The deeds the novel describes are terrible, but just as scary is its own mental realism. Quentin P’s terrible, broken reality is directly described in spare prose, identities hidden. The audience is plunged trapped in his consciousness, obliged to see mental processes and behaviors that shock. The alien nature of his thinking is like a physical shock – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Going into this book is less like reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and subsequently commenced having night terrors. On one occasion, the fear included a nightmare during which I was confined inside a container and, when I woke up, I found that I had removed the slat out of the window frame, trying to get out. That home was decaying; during heavy rain the downstairs hall filled with water, fly larvae came down from the roof into the bedroom, and once a big rodent climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.

Once a companion presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living at my family home, but the story about the home high on the Dover cliffs appeared known to me, homesick as I felt. This is a book about a haunted clamorous, emotional house and a female character who consumes chalk off the rocks. I cherished the book deeply and went back repeatedly to the story, consistently uncovering {something