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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I read this story years ago and it has stayed with me since then. The titular “summer people” turn out to be the Allisons urban dwellers, who rent the same isolated country cottage annually. During this visit, in place of heading back to the city, they decide to extend their stay an extra month – a decision that to disturb all the locals in the adjacent village. All pass on an identical cryptic advice that no one has remained at the lake after the end of summer. Even so, they are determined to not leave, and that’s when events begin to become stranger. The person who delivers fuel declines to provide for them. No one will deliver food to the cottage, and at the time the Allisons attempt to go to the village, the automobile won’t start. A tempest builds, the power of their radio die, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple crowded closely in their summer cottage and expected”. What might be the Allisons anticipating? What could the residents understand? Whenever I revisit the writer’s disturbing and thought-provoking narrative, I recall that the best horror stems from that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this brief tale two people travel to a typical coastal village where bells ring the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is irritating and unexplainable. The initial truly frightening scene takes place during the evening, as they choose to go for a stroll and they can’t find the sea. Sand is present, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and salt, there are waves, but the ocean is a ghost, or a different entity and more dreadful. It is simply deeply malevolent and each occasion I visit to the coast in the evening I think about this narrative which spoiled the sea at night to my mind – in a good way.

The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, the husband is older – go back to their lodging and find out the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and mortality and youth encounters grim ballet chaos. It’s an unnerving meditation regarding craving and decay, two bodies aging together as partners, the bond and violence and tenderness within wedlock.

Not merely the scariest, but likely among the finest concise narratives out there, and a beloved choice. I experienced it in Spanish, in the debut release of these tales to be released in Argentina several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this narrative beside the swimming area in France in 2020. Although it was sunny I felt an icy feeling through me. Additionally, I sensed the electricity of anticipation. I was writing my third novel, and I had hit an obstacle. I didn’t know if it was possible an effective approach to craft some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I understood that it was possible.

Published in 1995, the book is a bleak exploration into the thoughts of a criminal, the protagonist, based on an infamous individual, the murderer who slaughtered and cut apart numerous individuals in a city over a decade. Notoriously, this person was fixated with producing a submissive individual that would remain by his side and attempted numerous macabre trials to achieve this.

The deeds the book depicts are horrific, but just as scary is its emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s awful, fragmented world is simply narrated in spare prose, names redacted. You is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, compelled to observe thoughts and actions that appal. The foreignness of his mind feels like a physical shock – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Entering this book feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced having night terrors. At one point, the horror involved a nightmare during which I was trapped inside a container and, upon awakening, I found that I had removed the slat from the window, attempting to escape. That building was falling apart; during heavy rain the downstairs hall became inundated, fly larvae fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and at one time a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in that space.

After an acquaintance handed me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere in my childhood residence, but the narrative of the house high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to myself, homesick at that time. It is a novel about a haunted loud, atmospheric home and a female character who consumes limestone from the cliffs. I cherished the novel so much and came back again and again to it, each time discovering {something