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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from a master of suspense

I read this story years ago and it has stayed with me since then. The titular seasonal visitors are a couple from the city, who lease a particular isolated rural cabin each year. During this visit, rather than returning home, they decide to prolong their stay a few more weeks – something that seems to disturb everyone in the surrounding community. Everyone conveys the same veiled caution that not a soul has ever stayed in the area past Labor Day. Nonetheless, the couple are resolved to stay, and at that point situations commence to become stranger. The man who supplies fuel declines to provide to them. No one agrees to bring food to the cottage, and when the Allisons attempt to drive into town, their vehicle refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the power of their radio diminish, and when night comes, “the elderly couple clung to each other in their summer cottage and expected”. What could be this couple waiting for? What could the townspeople know? Every time I read the writer’s unnerving and thought-provoking narrative, I remember that the best horror stems from what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this short story two people go to a typical beach community where bells ring the whole time, a constant chiming that is irritating and inexplicable. The initial truly frightening moment happens during the evening, when they decide to go for a stroll and they fail to see the ocean. The beach is there, the scent exists of rotting fish and brine, there are waves, but the sea seems phantom, or something else and more dreadful. It’s just profoundly ominous and every time I travel to the shore after dark I remember this narrative that destroyed the beach in the evening for me – favorably.

The recent spouses – she’s very young, he’s not – go back to the inn and discover the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of confinement, necro-orgy and demise and innocence meets danse macabre chaos. It is a disturbing meditation about longing and decay, two bodies aging together as partners, the connection and brutality and gentleness in matrimony.

Not just the most terrifying, but perhaps one of the best short stories available, and a beloved choice. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of this author’s works to appear locally a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I read this book near the water in France recently. Although it was sunny I sensed cold creep through me. Additionally, I sensed the excitement of fascination. I was composing my latest book, and I had hit an obstacle. I didn’t know whether there existed a proper method to compose certain terrifying elements the book contains. Experiencing this novel, I realized that it was possible.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a dark flight into the thoughts of a young serial killer, the protagonist, based on an infamous individual, the serial killer who slaughtered and mutilated multiple victims in Milwaukee during a specific period. Notoriously, the killer was consumed with creating a compliant victim that would remain him and attempted numerous macabre trials to do so.

The actions the story tells are terrible, but equally frightening is the mental realism. The protagonist’s terrible, shattered existence is simply narrated with concise language, details omitted. The reader is plunged stuck in his mind, compelled to observe thoughts and actions that appal. The alien nature of his mind resembles a tangible impact – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Starting Zombie is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel by a gifted writer

When I was a child, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced suffering from bad dreams. Once, the horror involved a nightmare in which I was trapped inside a container and, upon awakening, I found that I had removed the slat from the window, trying to get out. That house was crumbling; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall flooded, insect eggs dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and at one time a big rodent ascended the window coverings in that space.

When a friend gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere at my family home, but the tale regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs appeared known to myself, homesick as I was. It is a novel about a haunted loud, atmospheric home and a girl who consumes chalk off the rocks. I loved the book immensely and came back repeatedly to it, consistently uncovering {something