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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by a master of suspense

I encountered this tale long ago and it has haunted me ever since. The titular vacationers turn out to be a family from New York, who lease the same off-grid lakeside house annually. During this visit, rather than heading back to urban life, they decide to prolong their stay an extra month – an action that appears to disturb each resident in the surrounding community. All pass on an identical cryptic advice that no one has ever stayed in the area after the end of summer. Regardless, they insist to remain, and that’s when things start to become stranger. The person who delivers fuel declines to provide for them. Not a single person will deliver food to the cottage, and as they attempt to travel to the community, the car won’t start. A tempest builds, the batteries in the radio die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the aged individuals clung to each other in their summer cottage and expected”. What might be this couple expecting? What do the townspeople know? Every time I revisit this author’s chilling and thought-provoking narrative, I remember that the best horror comes from that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative two people go to an ordinary coastal village in which chimes sound continuously, a perpetual pealing that is annoying and unexplainable. The first truly frightening moment occurs during the evening, at the time they decide to take a walk and they fail to see the water. Sand is present, there is the odor of putrid marine life and brine, surf is audible, but the water is a ghost, or another thing and even more alarming. It’s just deeply malevolent and each occasion I go to the shore after dark I remember this narrative that destroyed the beach in the evening for me – in a good way.

The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – head back to the inn and discover the cause of the ringing, during a prolonged scene of confinement, macabre revelry and mortality and youth meets grim ballet pandemonium. It’s a chilling meditation about longing and deterioration, a pair of individuals growing old jointly as partners, the bond and aggression and gentleness within wedlock.

Not only the most terrifying, but perhaps among the finest concise narratives available, and an individual preference. I read it in Spanish, in the initial publication of this author’s works to be published in Argentina several years back.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I perused Zombie by a pool in the French countryside a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I experienced cold creep through me. I also experienced the excitement of anticipation. I was working on a new project, and I encountered a wall. I wasn’t sure whether there existed an effective approach to compose some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Going through this book, I understood that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a dark flight through the mind of a criminal, the protagonist, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who murdered and mutilated multiple victims in Milwaukee during a specific period. Notoriously, Dahmer was obsessed with creating a submissive individual who would stay him and attempted numerous macabre trials to do so.

The acts the story tells are appalling, but just as scary is the emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s terrible, broken reality is simply narrated with concise language, identities hidden. You is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, compelled to witness thoughts and actions that appal. The foreignness of his psyche feels like a tangible impact – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Entering Zombie feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching from a gifted writer

In my early years, I sleepwalked and later started suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the terror featured a dream during which I was trapped in a box and, as I roused, I realized that I had removed a piece out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That house was falling apart; when storms came the ground floor corridor became inundated, insect eggs fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and once a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in the bedroom.

When a friend handed me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living in my childhood residence, but the story about the home high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar in my view, homesick as I felt. This is a novel featuring a possessed noisy, sentimental building and a young woman who ingests calcium off the rocks. I cherished the story immensely and returned again and again to the story, always finding {something