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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from a master of suspense

I encountered this tale long ago and it has lingered with me since then. The titular vacationers turn out to be the Allisons from New York, who rent an identical off-grid lakeside house each year. This time, instead of going back to urban life, they decide to extend their stay for a month longer – something that seems to alarm each resident in the surrounding community. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that nobody has ever stayed at the lake beyond Labor Day. Regardless, they are resolved to not leave, and that is the moment situations commence to get increasingly weird. The man who delivers fuel declines to provide for them. Not a single person will deliver food to the cabin, and as the family try to travel to the community, their vehicle fails to start. A tempest builds, the energy within the device fade, and with the arrival of dusk, “the aged individuals huddled together within their rental and waited”. What might be they waiting for? What could the residents understand? Whenever I peruse the writer’s chilling and thought-provoking tale, I’m reminded that the top terror comes from that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a couple go to a common seaside town where church bells toll continuously, a constant chiming that is annoying and unexplainable. The opening extremely terrifying episode takes place during the evening, when they choose to go for a stroll and they fail to see the ocean. Sand is present, the scent exists of rotting fish and seawater, waves crash, but the ocean appears spectral, or something else and more dreadful. It is truly insanely sinister and each occasion I go to the shore at night I remember this narrative which spoiled the beach in the evening in my view – positively.

The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – head back to the inn and learn the cause of the ringing, during a prolonged scene of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and mortality and youth meets danse macabre pandemonium. It’s an unnerving contemplation regarding craving and deterioration, a pair of individuals aging together as a couple, the attachment and violence and tenderness in matrimony.

Not just the scariest, but likely among the finest short stories available, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in Spanish, in the debut release of Aickman stories to appear locally several years back.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this narrative beside the swimming area in the French countryside a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I experienced cold creep through me. I also experienced the thrill of anticipation. I was working on my third novel, and I had hit a block. I wasn’t sure if there was a proper method to write some of the fearful things the book contains. Reading Zombie, I saw that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a dark flight into the thoughts of a young serial killer, the main character, based on a notorious figure, the murderer who slaughtered and mutilated multiple victims in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, this person was obsessed with making a submissive individual who would stay him and carried out several horrific efforts to do so.

The deeds the novel describes are horrific, but just as scary is its own psychological persuasiveness. The character’s awful, fragmented world is simply narrated in spare prose, identities hidden. You is immersed trapped in his consciousness, obliged to witness thoughts and actions that shock. The strangeness of his psyche feels like a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Entering this book is not just reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from a gifted writer

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and subsequently commenced having night terrors. At one point, the terror included a vision in which I was trapped within an enclosure and, upon awakening, I realized that I had torn off a piece off the window, attempting to escape. That home was crumbling; during heavy rain the entranceway flooded, insect eggs dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and at one time a large rat ascended the window coverings in the bedroom.

Once a companion handed me the story, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the tale of the house high on the Dover cliffs appeared known in my view, nostalgic as I felt. It is a novel featuring a possessed noisy, sentimental building and a young woman who consumes calcium from the shoreline. I cherished the novel deeply and returned repeatedly to its pages, each time discovering {something