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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I read this narrative years ago and it has haunted me since then. The named “summer people” are a family from New York, who lease the same isolated rural cabin annually. During this visit, rather than going back home, they opt to prolong their holiday for a month longer – something that seems to unsettle everyone in the nearby town. Each repeats the same veiled caution that not a soul has remained in the area past Labor Day. Even so, the couple are resolved to stay, and that’s when events begin to grow more bizarre. The person who delivers fuel refuses to sell for them. Nobody is willing to supply supplies to their home, and as the family endeavor to travel to the community, their vehicle fails to start. Bad weather approaches, the energy in the radio fade, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people huddled together inside their cabin and waited”. What might be this couple expecting? What could the locals know? Whenever I revisit the writer’s chilling and inspiring narrative, I remember that the top terror comes from the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from a noted author

In this short story a pair travel to a common coastal village in which chimes sound continuously, a constant chiming that is annoying and unexplainable. The first very scary moment occurs after dark, at the time they opt to walk around and they can’t find the sea. The beach is there, the scent exists of putrid marine life and brine, waves crash, but the ocean seems phantom, or another thing and more dreadful. It is truly insanely sinister and every time I travel to a beach after dark I recall this tale that ruined the beach in the evening in my view – positively.

The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, the husband is older – go back to their lodging and find out the cause of the ringing, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and death-and-the-maiden meets dance of death chaos. It’s a chilling meditation about longing and decline, two bodies maturing in tandem as partners, the bond and aggression and tenderness of marriage.

Not just the most terrifying, but perhaps one of the best short stories available, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to be released locally several years back.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I delved into Zombie near the water in the French countryside in 2020. Despite the sunshine I sensed an icy feeling within me. Additionally, I sensed the electricity of anticipation. I was composing a new project, and I had hit a block. I wasn’t sure if there was a proper method to craft certain terrifying elements the story includes. Reading Zombie, I realized that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a dark flight through the mind of a criminal, the main character, modeled after an infamous individual, the serial killer who murdered and cut apart numerous individuals in Milwaukee over a decade. Notoriously, this person was consumed with making a compliant victim that would remain by his side and attempted numerous grisly attempts to accomplish it.

The actions the book depicts are terrible, but just as scary is the emotional authenticity. Quentin P’s terrible, fragmented world is directly described with concise language, names redacted. The reader is immersed stuck in his mind, compelled to witness thoughts and actions that horrify. The foreignness of his mind feels like a bodily jolt – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Going into this book is less like reading but a complete immersion. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I sleepwalked and eventually began experiencing nightmares. Once, the fear featured a dream in which I was stuck in a box and, when I woke up, I realized that I had torn off a piece out of the window frame, trying to get out. That house was crumbling; when storms came the ground floor corridor flooded, insect eggs came down from the roof onto the bed, and once a big rodent scaled the curtains in my sister’s room.

Once a companion presented me with the story, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the story of the house high on the Dover cliffs appeared known to me, homesick as I was. It is a book about a haunted loud, atmospheric home and a female character who consumes calcium from the cliffs. I cherished the story deeply and came back repeatedly to the story, always finding {something