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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I read this story some time back and it has stayed with me since then. The named vacationers turn out to be a couple from the city, who rent the same remote lakeside house every summer. On this occasion, rather than returning home, they decide to prolong their stay an extra month – an action that appears to unsettle all the locals in the surrounding community. All pass on the same veiled caution that not a soul has ever stayed by the water past the holiday. Even so, they are determined to not leave, and that’s when situations commence to get increasingly weird. The man who delivers fuel declines to provide to the couple. Not a single person agrees to bring food to the cottage, and when they endeavor to travel to the community, the car fails to start. A tempest builds, the energy within the device diminish, and when night comes, “the elderly couple huddled together inside their cabin and expected”. What could be they anticipating? What might the residents know? Each occasion I revisit this author’s unnerving and thought-provoking tale, I’m reminded that the best horror comes from that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from a noted author

In this short story a couple travel to a common beach community in which chimes sound the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and unexplainable. The initial truly frightening episode happens after dark, when they decide to walk around and they can’t find the sea. Sand is present, there is the odor of putrid marine life and brine, surf is audible, but the sea is a ghost, or another thing and even more alarming. It is truly insanely sinister and every time I visit to the shore after dark I remember this story that destroyed the ocean after dark to my mind – favorably.

The newlyweds – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – return to the hotel and discover the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and demise and innocence encounters dance of death bedlam. It is a disturbing reflection about longing and deterioration, two bodies aging together as a couple, the bond and aggression and affection within wedlock.

Not just the scariest, but probably among the finest short stories out there, and a personal favourite. I read it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of these tales to be published in Argentina several years back.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this narrative near the water overseas a few years ago. Although it was sunny I experienced cold creep through me. I also felt the electricity of fascination. I was writing my third novel, and I had hit a block. I was uncertain whether there existed an effective approach to write certain terrifying elements the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I realized that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the story is a grim journey within the psyche of a criminal, the protagonist, inspired by a notorious figure, the serial killer who murdered and cut apart 17 young men and boys in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, Dahmer was consumed with producing a zombie sex slave that would remain with him and carried out several grisly attempts to do so.

The deeds the novel describes are horrific, but similarly terrifying is the mental realism. The character’s dreadful, fragmented world is directly described with concise language, names redacted. You is immersed caught in his thoughts, forced to witness thoughts and actions that appal. The strangeness of his thinking feels like a bodily jolt – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Going into Zombie is less like reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and later started experiencing nightmares. On one occasion, the terror involved a dream where I was trapped inside a container and, upon awakening, I realized that I had ripped a part off the window, seeking to leave. That home was falling apart; when storms came the ground floor corridor became inundated, insect eggs fell from the ceiling onto the bed, and at one time a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

Once a companion presented me with the story, I was no longer living with my parents, but the story regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to me, homesick as I was. This is a story concerning a ghostly clamorous, emotional house and a young woman who consumes limestone from the shoreline. I adored the novel deeply and came back repeatedly to the story, always finding {something