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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from a master of suspense

I read this story long ago and it has stayed with me ever since. The titular “summer people” are the Allisons from the city, who lease the same isolated lakeside house every summer. During this visit, instead of heading back to urban life, they choose to lengthen their vacation an extra month – something that seems to unsettle all the locals in the nearby town. All pass on the same veiled caution that not a soul has ever stayed by the water beyond Labor Day. Nonetheless, they insist to stay, and that’s when things start to grow more bizarre. The person who delivers the kerosene refuses to sell for them. Nobody is willing to supply food to their home, and at the time the Allisons attempt to travel to the community, their vehicle won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the power within the device die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the aged individuals huddled together in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What might be they expecting? What could the locals know? Whenever I peruse this author’s disturbing and influential tale, I recall that the finest fright stems from the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a couple travel to a common seaside town where bells ring the whole time, a constant chiming that is bothersome and inexplicable. The initial truly frightening scene happens during the evening, as they decide to take a walk and they can’t find the sea. Sand is present, there is the odor of decaying seafood and salt, waves crash, but the ocean is a ghost, or a different entity and more dreadful. It is truly profoundly ominous and every time I travel to the shore after dark I recall this narrative that destroyed the sea at night to my mind – in a good way.

The recent spouses – she’s very young, the husband is older – return to their lodging and learn the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of confinement, gruesome festivities and demise and innocence meets dance of death bedlam. It is a disturbing meditation about longing and decline, a pair of individuals aging together as a couple, the connection and brutality and gentleness of marriage.

Not only the most terrifying, but probably among the finest concise narratives in existence, and a beloved choice. I read it in Spanish, in the first edition of these tales to be released locally several years back.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this narrative by a pool in France recently. Despite the sunshine I experienced an icy feeling through me. I also experienced the electricity of fascination. I was composing a new project, and I faced a block. I wasn’t sure if it was possible a proper method to craft certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Going through this book, I saw that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the novel is a dark flight within the psyche of a young serial killer, the main character, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who killed and mutilated multiple victims in the Midwest during a specific period. Notoriously, Dahmer was consumed with creating a zombie sex slave who would never leave him and attempted numerous macabre trials to achieve this.

The deeds the story tells are horrific, but equally frightening is the emotional authenticity. The character’s dreadful, fragmented world is simply narrated with concise language, identities hidden. The reader is immersed trapped in his consciousness, obliged to see mental processes and behaviors that shock. The alien nature of his psyche resembles a tangible impact – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Entering this book feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I walked in my sleep and later started suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the horror included a dream where I was trapped within an enclosure 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; during heavy rain the entranceway filled with water, fly larvae fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and at one time a large rat scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

When a friend presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out with my parents, but the narrative regarding the building perched on the cliffs appeared known to myself, nostalgic at that time. It is a book about a haunted noisy, atmospheric home and a young woman who eats chalk from the cliffs. I adored the novel deeply and came back frequently to the story, always finding {something