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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 “summer people” happen to be the Allisons from the city, who lease an identical off-grid rural cabin every summer. This time, in place of returning to the city, they opt to prolong their holiday an extra month – something that seems to unsettle everyone in the nearby town. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that not a soul has remained by the water after Labor Day. Regardless, the Allisons insist to not leave, and that’s when events begin to get increasingly weird. The person who supplies fuel won’t sell to the couple. No one is willing to supply supplies to the cottage, and at the time the Allisons endeavor to go to the village, the automobile refuses to operate. A storm gathers, the energy within the device fade, and when night comes, “the elderly couple huddled together within their rental and waited”. What might be this couple anticipating? What do the locals know? Every time I revisit this author’s disturbing and inspiring story, I recall that the best horror comes from the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this short story a pair travel to a typical seaside town where bells ring the whole time, an incessant ringing that is annoying and inexplicable. The initial truly frightening scene takes place during the evening, at the time they choose to go for a stroll and they fail to see the ocean. The beach is there, the scent exists of rotting fish and seawater, waves crash, but the ocean is a ghost, or something else and more dreadful. It is truly profoundly ominous and each occasion I travel to the shore at night I remember this tale that ruined the sea at night for me – favorably.

The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, the husband is older – return to the hotel and learn the cause of the ringing, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and mortality and youth encounters grim ballet chaos. It’s a chilling reflection on desire and deterioration, two bodies aging together as partners, the bond and violence and tenderness within wedlock.

Not only the most terrifying, but probably among the finest concise narratives in existence, and a personal favourite. I read it in Spanish, in the first edition of these tales to be released in this country in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this book near the water overseas recently. Although it was sunny I felt an icy feeling through me. I also experienced the thrill of anticipation. I was writing my third novel, and I had hit an obstacle. I was uncertain whether there existed any good way to compose some of the fearful things the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I realized that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the story is a bleak exploration within the psyche of a murderer, the protagonist, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who murdered and dismembered numerous individuals in the Midwest during a specific period. As is well-known, this person was consumed with producing a submissive individual who would stay by his side and attempted numerous grisly attempts to accomplish it.

The actions the novel describes are appalling, but just as scary is its own mental realism. The character’s awful, broken reality is plainly told using minimal words, identities hidden. The audience is plunged caught in his thoughts, obliged to witness mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The strangeness of his psyche is like a physical shock – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Entering this story feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by a gifted writer

When I was a child, I sleepwalked and eventually began experiencing nightmares. At one point, the terror involved a nightmare where I was confined inside a container and, as I roused, I discovered that I had torn off a piece out of the window frame, attempting to escape. That house was falling apart; when it rained heavily the ground floor corridor became inundated, insect eggs fell from the ceiling on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a big rodent climbed the drapes in the bedroom.

After an acquaintance gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the tale regarding the building located on the coastline felt familiar to myself, homesick as I felt. It is a novel featuring a possessed clamorous, atmospheric home and a female character who ingests calcium off the rocks. I loved the book so much and returned frequently to it, consistently uncovering {something