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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson

I read this tale long ago and it has lingered with me ever since. The so-called “summer people” are the Allisons from the city, who lease the same remote country cottage annually. During this visit, rather than heading back home, they opt to extend their vacation a few more weeks – something that seems to unsettle everyone in the adjacent village. All pass on a similar vague warning that no one has ever stayed at the lake after the end of summer. Even so, they insist to remain, and that’s when things start to become stranger. The man who brings the kerosene won’t sell to the couple. No one will deliver supplies to the cottage, and as they endeavor to travel to the community, the automobile won’t start. A tempest builds, the power within the device diminish, and when night comes, “the aged individuals crowded closely within their rental and expected”. What are they expecting? What could the townspeople be aware of? Whenever I revisit Jackson’s unnerving and inspiring tale, I’m reminded that the best horror stems from that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman

In this short story two people journey to an ordinary coastal village where church bells toll continuously, a constant chiming that is irritating and puzzling. The initial extremely terrifying scene happens during the evening, at the time they opt to take a walk and they fail to see the water. There’s sand, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and seawater, waves crash, but the sea appears spectral, or a different entity and even more alarming. It is truly profoundly ominous and each occasion I visit to the coast in the evening I remember this tale that destroyed the beach in the evening in my view – in a good way.

The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – head back to the hotel and discover the reason for the chiming, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and mortality and youth meets danse macabre chaos. It is a disturbing contemplation about longing and decay, two bodies maturing in tandem as spouses, the connection and brutality and affection within wedlock.

Not only the scariest, but probably among the finest brief tales in existence, and an individual preference. I encountered it en español, in the first edition of Aickman stories to be released in this country in 2011.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this narrative near the water in France recently. Despite the sunshine I sensed cold creep over me. Additionally, I sensed the excitement of anticipation. I was writing my latest book, and I faced an obstacle. I wasn’t sure if it was possible any good way to write some of the fearful things the story includes. Reading Zombie, I understood that it was possible.

Published in 1995, the novel is a grim journey within the psyche of a criminal, the main character, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who slaughtered and dismembered multiple victims in Milwaukee over a decade. Infamously, this person was fixated with making a submissive individual that would remain with him and attempted numerous horrific efforts to do so.

The actions the story tells are horrific, but just as scary is its own mental realism. The protagonist’s dreadful, shattered existence is plainly told with concise language, details omitted. The reader is plunged caught in his thoughts, forced to witness thoughts and actions that horrify. The strangeness of his thinking resembles a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Going into this story is less like reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and subsequently commenced having night terrors. At one point, the terror included a dream in which I was stuck in a box and, upon awakening, I discovered that I had ripped a part from the window, trying to get out. That building was falling apart; when it rained heavily the entranceway became inundated, fly larvae came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a large rat ascended the window coverings in that space.

Once a companion presented me with the story, I had moved out at my family home, but the narrative regarding the building perched on the cliffs appeared known to me, nostalgic as I felt. This is a story featuring a possessed noisy, sentimental building and a girl who ingests chalk off the rocks. I cherished the novel immensely and went back again and again to the story, always finding {something