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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I read this story long ago and it has lingered with me from that moment. The so-called “summer people” are the Allisons from New York, who lease the same off-grid country cottage annually. During this visit, instead of going back to urban life, they opt to prolong their vacation a few more weeks – an action that appears to unsettle everyone in the surrounding community. All pass on a similar vague warning that no one has ever stayed at the lake after the end of summer. Regardless, the couple are determined to not leave, and that’s when things start to become stranger. The individual who brings fuel won’t sell to them. No one agrees to bring supplies to the cabin, and as the family attempt to drive into town, the car fails to start. A tempest builds, the energy within the device fade, and when night comes, “the two old people crowded closely within their rental and anticipated”. What are the Allisons waiting for? What do the locals know? Each occasion I revisit the writer’s disturbing and inspiring narrative, I remember that the best horror stems from what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman

In this short story a pair go to a common beach community in which chimes sound constantly, an incessant ringing that is annoying and inexplicable. The opening extremely terrifying episode occurs at night, when they decide to go for a stroll and they fail to see the water. There’s sand, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and salt, waves crash, but the water appears spectral, or something else and more dreadful. It is truly profoundly ominous and every time I travel to the shore in the evening I recall this narrative which spoiled the beach in the evening in my view – positively.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, the husband is older – head back to the hotel and find out the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and mortality and youth intersects with grim ballet pandemonium. It is a disturbing reflection regarding craving and decay, two people maturing in tandem as a couple, the bond and aggression and tenderness in matrimony.

Not merely the most terrifying, but perhaps among the finest brief tales in existence, and an individual preference. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of this author’s works to be published locally a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I read this book beside the swimming area overseas in 2020. Even with the bright weather I experienced cold creep over me. Additionally, I sensed the electricity of fascination. I was composing my latest book, and I encountered a wall. I wasn’t sure if it was possible an effective approach to write various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Experiencing this novel, I understood that it was possible.

Published in 1995, the book is a dark flight through the mind of a criminal, the protagonist, inspired by a notorious figure, the serial killer who killed and dismembered multiple victims in Milwaukee over a decade. Infamously, this person was fixated with making a compliant victim that would remain him and made many grisly attempts to accomplish it.

The actions the novel describes are horrific, but just as scary is its own emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s dreadful, broken reality is plainly told using minimal words, details omitted. The reader is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, compelled to observe thoughts and actions that appal. The foreignness of his psyche feels like a physical shock – or getting lost on a desolate planet. Entering this book is not just reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I walked in my sleep and later started having night terrors. Once, the terror featured a dream where I was confined within an enclosure and, as I roused, I discovered that I had torn off the slat off the window, trying to get out. That building was falling apart; during heavy rain the entranceway flooded, maggots came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and once a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

Once a companion presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out with my parents, but the story of the house high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to myself, nostalgic as I felt. It’s a story featuring a possessed loud, sentimental building and a young woman who ingests chalk from the cliffs. I adored the novel immensely and went back again and again to it, always finding {something