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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I encountered this story long ago and it has lingered with me since then. The titular “summer people” happen to be a couple urban dwellers, who rent a particular off-grid lakeside house every summer. This time, in place of heading back home, they choose to prolong their holiday an extra month – an action that appears to disturb everyone in the surrounding community. All pass on a similar vague warning that not a soul has ever stayed by the water after the holiday. Nonetheless, they are resolved to stay, and at that point situations commence to become stranger. The person who brings oil declines to provide for them. No one agrees to bring supplies to the cottage, and when the family try to drive into town, their vehicle refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the power in the radio diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple clung to each other within their rental and expected”. What could be the Allisons expecting? What do the townspeople know? Each occasion I revisit Jackson’s disturbing and influential story, I recall that the best horror stems from that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a couple journey to an ordinary beach community in which chimes sound the whole time, a constant chiming that is annoying and puzzling. The opening very scary moment takes place at night, as they choose to walk around and they fail to see the sea. There’s sand, there is the odor of rotting fish and seawater, there are waves, but the sea seems phantom, or something else and even more alarming. It is simply profoundly ominous and every time I visit to a beach in the evening I think about this tale that ruined the sea at night to my mind – in a good way.

The newlyweds – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – head back to the hotel and discover why the bells ring, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and mortality and youth encounters danse macabre pandemonium. It’s a chilling reflection on desire and decline, a pair of individuals growing old jointly as a couple, the connection and brutality and gentleness in matrimony.

Not merely the scariest, but perhaps a top example of short stories out there, and an individual preference. I encountered it in Spanish, in the first edition of these tales to be published in Argentina several years back.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer

I read this narrative beside the swimming area overseas in 2020. Despite the sunshine I experienced a chill over me. I also experienced the electricity of excitement. I was working on my latest book, and I encountered a wall. I was uncertain if it was possible a proper method to write various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I saw that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a bleak exploration within the psyche of a young serial killer, the protagonist, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who slaughtered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in a city during a specific period. Infamously, this person was obsessed with making a compliant victim that would remain with him and attempted numerous horrific efforts to accomplish it.

The actions the book depicts are terrible, but just as scary is its own mental realism. The protagonist’s awful, broken reality is simply narrated using minimal words, names redacted. The audience is sunk deep stuck in his mind, obliged to observe thoughts and actions that horrify. The foreignness of his mind feels like a physical shock – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Entering this story feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I was a somnambulist and eventually began having night terrors. On one occasion, the fear featured a nightmare where I was confined in a box and, as I roused, I found that I had removed a part off the window, trying to get out. That house was falling apart; when storms came the downstairs hall flooded, fly larvae dropped from above onto the bed, and once a large rat scaled the curtains in that space.

Once a companion gave me the story, I was no longer living with my parents, but the narrative regarding the building perched on the cliffs appeared known in my view, longing as I was. This is a story concerning a ghostly loud, atmospheric home and a female character who eats limestone from the shoreline. I cherished the story immensely and went back repeatedly to it, consistently uncovering {something