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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I read this narrative some time back and it has haunted me since then. The named seasonal visitors happen to be a family from New York, who lease a particular remote rural cabin each year. On this occasion, in place of heading back to the city, they choose to lengthen their stay an extra month – a decision that to unsettle everyone in the adjacent village. All pass on the same veiled caution that no one has remained in the area beyond the holiday. Even so, the couple insist to stay, and that’s when things start to grow more bizarre. The man who supplies the kerosene refuses to sell to them. Nobody is willing to supply groceries to the cabin, and as the Allisons try to go to the village, their vehicle fails to start. Bad weather approaches, the energy within the device die, and when night comes, “the elderly couple huddled together in their summer cottage and expected”. What might be they waiting for? What might the locals be aware of? Every time I read this author’s disturbing and influential narrative, I recall that the best horror comes from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this short story a couple journey to a common beach community in which chimes sound continuously, an incessant ringing that is irritating and unexplainable. The opening very scary episode takes place at night, as they decide to go for a stroll and they fail to see the sea. There’s sand, there is the odor of decaying seafood and salt, there are waves, but the ocean seems phantom, or another thing and worse. It’s just insanely sinister and each occasion I travel to a beach at night I think about this narrative that destroyed the sea at night for me – in a good way.

The newlyweds – the woman is adolescent, the husband is older – go back to the hotel and discover the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and mortality and youth intersects with grim ballet bedlam. It’s an unnerving reflection about longing and decay, two people maturing in tandem as spouses, the bond and brutality and affection within wedlock.

Not merely the most terrifying, but likely one of the best brief tales in existence, and a personal favourite. I read it en español, in the initial publication of these tales to be released in Argentina in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I read this book near the water in the French countryside in 2020. Although it was sunny I experienced cold creep through me. I also felt the thrill of fascination. I was writing my third novel, and I had hit a block. I didn’t know if it was possible a proper method to craft certain terrifying elements the story includes. Going through this book, I realized that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a grim journey within the psyche of a young serial killer, the protagonist, inspired by an infamous individual, the criminal who murdered and cut apart numerous individuals in a city during a specific period. Notoriously, this person was consumed with producing a zombie sex slave who would never leave by his side and attempted numerous grisly attempts to accomplish it.

The deeds the novel describes are terrible, but similarly terrifying is its emotional authenticity. Quentin P’s dreadful, shattered existence is directly described with concise language, names redacted. The reader is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, compelled to see mental processes and behaviors that appal. The strangeness of his thinking is like a bodily jolt – or being stranded in an empty realm. Going into this book feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

When I was a child, I sleepwalked and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. Once, the horror included a vision in which I was confined in a box and, as I roused, I found that I had ripped the slat out of the window frame, trying to get out. That house was crumbling; during heavy rain the entranceway filled with water, insect eggs came down from the roof into the bedroom, and at one time a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in my sister’s room.

Once a companion handed me this author’s book, I was residing elsewhere at my family home, but the tale about the home high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar in my view, nostalgic at that time. It’s a novel concerning a ghostly noisy, sentimental building and a young woman who consumes limestone from the cliffs. I loved the novel immensely and returned again and again to the story, always finding {something