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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I encountered this story long ago and it has lingered with me since then. The named “summer people” happen to be a family from the city, who rent a particular off-grid rural cabin annually. During this visit, in place of going back home, they choose to extend their stay for a month longer – a decision that to disturb each resident in the surrounding community. Each repeats a similar vague warning that not a soul has ever stayed by the water after Labor Day. Nonetheless, the Allisons insist to not leave, and at that point things start to get increasingly weird. The individual who delivers the kerosene refuses to sell for them. Not a single person agrees to bring supplies to their home, and when they endeavor to travel to the community, the car won’t start. A storm gathers, the batteries of their radio fade, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple huddled together in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What are the Allisons anticipating? What might the townspeople know? Whenever I revisit the writer’s disturbing and thought-provoking narrative, I’m reminded that the best horror originates in that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes from a noted author

In this concise narrative a couple travel to a common seaside town in which chimes sound continuously, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and puzzling. The opening truly frightening episode takes place during the evening, when they opt to go for a stroll and they fail to see the ocean. Sand is present, there’s the smell of rotting fish and brine, there are waves, but the water is a ghost, or a different entity and worse. It is truly deeply malevolent and whenever I travel to the shore after dark I remember this story that ruined the ocean after dark in my view – positively.

The young couple – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – go back to the inn and learn the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of confinement, gruesome festivities and demise and innocence intersects with danse macabre chaos. It’s a chilling contemplation on desire and decay, two people aging together as partners, the connection and violence and gentleness within wedlock.

Not only the most terrifying, but perhaps among the finest short stories available, and a personal favourite. I experienced it en español, in the debut release of this author’s works to be published in Argentina in 2011.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I read this book by a pool in the French countryside in 2020. Even with the bright weather I experienced a chill over me. Additionally, I sensed the excitement of excitement. I was working on my latest book, and I had hit an obstacle. I didn’t know whether there existed an effective approach to write some of the fearful things the book contains. Going through this book, I realized that it could be done.

Published in 1995, the novel is a grim journey through the mind of a young serial killer, the protagonist, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who slaughtered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in the Midwest over a decade. Notoriously, Dahmer was obsessed with producing a submissive individual who would stay by his side and attempted numerous grisly attempts to accomplish it.

The deeds the story tells are terrible, but just as scary is its own psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s terrible, shattered existence is simply narrated using minimal words, details omitted. The reader is immersed caught in his thoughts, forced to observe mental processes and behaviors that appal. The alien nature of his psyche resembles a bodily jolt – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Going into this story is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and later started having night terrors. At one point, the fear featured a nightmare in which I was trapped within an enclosure and, as I roused, I realized that I had removed the slat out of the window frame, trying to get out. That house was decaying; when it rained heavily the entranceway became inundated, fly larvae came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and at one time a large rat scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

Once a companion handed me the story, I was no longer living at my family home, but the tale of the house perched on the cliffs felt familiar to myself, nostalgic as I was. This is a novel concerning a ghostly clamorous, sentimental building and a female character who eats limestone from the shoreline. I cherished the story deeply and went back repeatedly to it, each time discovering {something