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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense

I discovered this tale long ago and it has lingered with me from that moment. The so-called “summer people” happen to be the Allisons from New York, who rent an identical remote lakeside house every summer. On this occasion, in place of heading back to the city, they choose to lengthen their holiday a few more weeks – a decision that to unsettle each resident in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys the same veiled caution that not a soul has ever stayed at the lake past Labor Day. Regardless, they are resolved to remain, and that is the moment events begin to become stranger. The individual who supplies oil refuses to sell to them. No one agrees to bring food to the cabin, and at the time the Allisons endeavor to go to the village, the car won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the batteries of their radio die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the aged individuals crowded closely inside their cabin and expected”. What are they anticipating? What might the locals know? Every time I peruse this author’s unnerving and influential tale, I remember that the best horror stems from what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by a noted author

In this brief tale two people journey to a typical coastal village where bells ring constantly, a constant chiming that is irritating and puzzling. The opening very scary moment happens during the evening, as they opt to go for a stroll and they can’t find the sea. There’s sand, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and salt, there are waves, but the sea is a ghost, or something else and even more alarming. It is truly deeply malevolent and whenever I travel to the coast after dark I think about this narrative that destroyed the beach in the evening to my mind – in a good way.

The newlyweds – she’s very young, the husband is older – go back to the hotel and discover the reason for the chiming, during a prolonged scene of confinement, macabre revelry and mortality and youth meets dance of death bedlam. It is a disturbing reflection about longing and deterioration, two people growing old jointly as spouses, the connection and violence and affection within wedlock.

Not only the scariest, but likely a top example of brief tales in existence, and a personal favourite. I read it in Spanish, in the first edition of these tales to appear in Argentina several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this narrative near the water in the French countryside recently. Despite the sunshine I experienced an icy feeling within me. I also felt the electricity of excitement. I was composing a new project, and I faced a block. I was uncertain if there was any good way to write various frightening aspects the book contains. Reading Zombie, I saw that there was a way.

Published in 1995, the book is a dark flight within the psyche of a criminal, Quentin P, based on a notorious figure, the serial killer who slaughtered and cut apart numerous individuals in the Midwest over a decade. Notoriously, Dahmer was obsessed with making a compliant victim who would stay him and made many grisly attempts to achieve this.

The deeds the novel describes are appalling, but equally frightening is its psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s terrible, shattered existence is directly described in spare prose, identities hidden. You is immersed caught in his thoughts, obliged to see ideas and deeds that horrify. The alien nature of his thinking resembles a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Entering this book is less like reading than a full body experience. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and subsequently commenced having night terrors. Once, the horror involved a nightmare where I was trapped in a box and, upon awakening, I realized that I had removed the slat off the window, attempting to escape. That house was crumbling; when storms came the entranceway filled with water, maggots came down from the roof onto the bed, and once a sizeable vermin climbed the drapes in the bedroom.

When a friend handed me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out at my family home, but the narrative regarding the building located on the coastline seemed recognizable in my view, homesick as I felt. It is a novel about a haunted clamorous, sentimental building and a young woman who ingests chalk off the rocks. I cherished the book so much and returned frequently to it, consistently uncovering {something