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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by a master of suspense

I encountered this tale long ago and it has stayed with me ever since. The so-called “summer people” happen to be a family from the city, who rent a particular off-grid rural cabin each year. During this visit, rather than going back home, they decide to prolong their vacation a few more weeks – a decision that to disturb all the locals in the nearby town. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that nobody has lingered at the lake past Labor Day. Regardless, the Allisons are resolved to not leave, and at that point events begin to get increasingly weird. The person who delivers oil refuses to sell to the couple. Nobody will deliver food to their home, and when the Allisons attempt to drive into town, their vehicle refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the batteries within the device fade, and as darkness falls, “the two old people clung to each other within their rental and waited”. What are this couple anticipating? What might the residents know? Whenever I read Jackson’s chilling and inspiring narrative, I remember that the top terror originates in the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman

In this brief tale two people travel to a typical beach community where church bells toll constantly, an incessant ringing that is annoying and puzzling. The first truly frightening moment occurs after dark, at the time they opt to take a walk and they fail to see the water. The beach is there, the scent exists of rotting fish and salt, surf is audible, but the water seems phantom, or another thing and more dreadful. It is truly deeply malevolent and whenever I travel to a beach at night I recall this story that destroyed the beach in the evening for me – in a good way.

The newlyweds – she’s very young, the man is mature – go back to the hotel and learn the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of confinement, necro-orgy and demise and innocence intersects with dance of death bedlam. It’s an unnerving meditation regarding craving and decline, two bodies maturing in tandem as partners, the attachment and aggression and affection in matrimony.

Not only the most terrifying, but perhaps one of the best brief tales out there, and a personal favourite. I read it in Spanish, in the debut release of these tales to appear in this country in 2011.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this narrative beside the swimming area overseas in 2020. Despite the sunshine I experienced an icy feeling within me. I also experienced the excitement of fascination. I was writing my third novel, and I encountered a block. I didn’t know if it was possible any good way to compose certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Going through this book, I understood that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a dark flight through the mind of a young serial killer, the protagonist, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who slaughtered and mutilated numerous individuals in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, the killer was consumed with producing a zombie sex slave that would remain with him and made many horrific efforts to accomplish it.

The acts the story tells are terrible, but equally frightening is the emotional authenticity. The character’s dreadful, shattered existence is directly described in spare prose, identities hidden. The reader is immersed caught in his thoughts, compelled to witness ideas and deeds that appal. The alien nature of his mind is like a bodily jolt – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Going into Zombie is less like reading but a complete immersion. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I was a somnambulist and later started suffering from bad dreams. Once, the fear involved a dream during which I was trapped inside a container and, upon awakening, I found that I had removed a piece off the window, trying to get out. That home was crumbling; when it rained heavily the entranceway filled with water, maggots dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and once a big rodent ascended the window coverings in that space.

Once a companion presented me with the story, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the tale of the house high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to me, nostalgic as I felt. It is a story about a haunted clamorous, emotional house and a female character who ingests calcium from the cliffs. I cherished the novel immensely and came back again and again to it, consistently uncovering {something