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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I read this story some time back and it has haunted me ever since. The named vacationers are a family from the city, who lease an identical isolated lakeside house each year. On this occasion, instead of heading back home, they opt to extend their vacation a few more weeks – a decision that to disturb each resident in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that nobody has remained in the area beyond the end of summer. Even so, the couple insist to remain, and at that point events begin to grow more bizarre. The man who delivers fuel refuses to sell to the couple. Not a single person agrees to bring food to the cottage, and at the time they attempt to drive into town, the automobile fails to start. A tempest builds, the energy in the radio fade, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple clung to each other inside their cabin and anticipated”. What might be the Allisons expecting? What could the townspeople know? Every time I read the writer’s unnerving and thought-provoking tale, I remember that the top terror stems from the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a couple go to a common seaside town where church bells toll the whole time, a constant chiming that is annoying and inexplicable. The first extremely terrifying moment takes place at night, at the time they decide to take a walk and they are unable to locate the sea. The beach is there, the scent exists of rotting fish and salt, waves crash, but the sea is a ghost, or another thing and more dreadful. It is truly insanely sinister and every time I travel to a beach after dark I recall this narrative that destroyed the beach in the evening to my mind – positively.

The young couple – the woman is adolescent, the husband is older – head back to the inn and learn why the bells ring, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and mortality and youth meets dance of death pandemonium. It’s an unnerving meditation on desire and deterioration, two bodies aging together as a couple, the attachment and aggression and tenderness within wedlock.

Not just the most terrifying, but probably one of the best brief tales in existence, and an individual preference. I encountered it in Spanish, in the first edition of these tales to appear in Argentina in 2011.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I perused this book near the water overseas recently. Despite the sunshine I sensed a chill through me. I also experienced the excitement of fascination. I was writing a new project, and I had hit a wall. I wasn’t sure if there was any good way to compose certain terrifying elements the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I saw that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the book is a dark flight into the thoughts of a murderer, the main character, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who murdered and cut apart multiple victims in Milwaukee over a decade. Infamously, Dahmer was obsessed with creating a zombie sex slave who would never leave with him and made many horrific efforts to achieve this.

The acts the novel describes are appalling, but just as scary is its emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s terrible, broken reality is directly described with concise language, identities hidden. The audience is immersed trapped in his consciousness, compelled to observe mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The alien nature of his mind is like a tangible impact – or getting lost in an empty realm. Starting this book is less like reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

During my youth, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced having night terrors. Once, the horror featured a vision where I was confined within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I realized that I had torn off a piece off the window, seeking to leave. That house was falling apart; when storms came the ground floor corridor filled with water, fly larvae came down from the roof into the bedroom, and at one time a big rodent scaled the curtains in that space.

When a friend presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living with my parents, but the story of the house located on the coastline seemed recognizable to myself, nostalgic as I was. It is a book about a haunted loud, sentimental building and a female character who ingests limestone from the cliffs. I cherished the novel so much and returned again and again to the story, always finding {something