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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I read this story years ago and it has lingered with me from that moment. The titular seasonal visitors are a couple urban dwellers, who rent the same isolated country cottage each year. During this visit, rather than returning to urban life, they opt to lengthen their vacation an extra month – something that seems to disturb everyone in the surrounding community. All pass on a similar vague warning that not a soul has lingered by the water beyond the holiday. Regardless, the Allisons insist to not leave, and at that point things start to grow more bizarre. The man who brings the kerosene refuses to sell to the couple. No one will deliver groceries to their home, and as the Allisons try to go to the village, the car fails to start. A tempest builds, the batteries of their radio die, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals clung to each other inside their cabin and expected”. What are this couple anticipating? What do the residents know? Each occasion I peruse this author’s disturbing and thought-provoking tale, I’m reminded that the finest fright stems from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a pair journey to a common seaside town in which chimes sound continuously, a constant chiming that is annoying and puzzling. The initial truly frightening moment takes place at night, as they choose to walk around and they are unable to locate the ocean. Sand is present, there is the odor of decaying seafood and salt, there are waves, but the water is a ghost, or something else and more dreadful. It’s just deeply malevolent and whenever I visit to the coast at night I remember this story that destroyed the sea at night to my mind – in a good way.

The recent spouses – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – return to the inn and learn the cause of the ringing, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth intersects with danse macabre bedlam. It’s a chilling meditation about longing and decay, two bodies maturing in tandem as a couple, the bond and brutality and tenderness of marriage.

Not merely the scariest, but probably among the finest short stories in existence, and an individual preference. I encountered it en español, in the initial publication of these tales to be released in this country in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this book by a pool in France recently. Despite the sunshine I sensed cold creep through me. I also felt the thrill of excitement. I was working on my latest book, and I encountered a wall. I wasn’t sure if it was possible a proper method to compose some of the fearful things the book contains. Reading Zombie, I saw that there was a way.

Released decades ago, the book is a grim journey into the thoughts of a young serial killer, Quentin P, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who killed and cut apart numerous individuals in the Midwest over a decade. As is well-known, this person was fixated with producing a submissive individual who would stay with him and attempted numerous macabre trials to accomplish it.

The deeds the story tells are appalling, but just as scary is the emotional authenticity. Quentin P’s awful, broken reality is simply narrated using minimal words, identities hidden. The reader is plunged caught in his thoughts, compelled to witness ideas and deeds that appal. The foreignness of his thinking is like a tangible impact – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Starting this book feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I walked in my sleep and later started having night terrors. Once, the horror included a nightmare in which I was confined in a box and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had removed a piece out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That home was decaying; during heavy rain the ground floor corridor filled with water, maggots fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and on one occasion a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in my sister’s room.

Once a companion handed me this author’s book, I was residing elsewhere at my family home, but the tale of the house high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to myself, homesick as I felt. This is a story featuring a possessed noisy, emotional house and a girl who eats calcium from the cliffs. I loved the novel immensely and came back frequently to its pages, consistently uncovering {something