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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 “summer people” happen to be a family from the city, who lease a particular off-grid lakeside house each year. This time, rather than going back home, they choose to extend their vacation an extra month – a decision that to disturb everyone in the nearby town. All pass on a similar vague warning that no one has lingered in the area past the end of summer. Regardless, the couple insist to not leave, and that’s when events begin to grow more bizarre. The individual who delivers oil declines to provide for them. No one will deliver groceries to the cottage, and at the time the Allisons try to go to the village, the car fails to start. A tempest builds, the energy in the radio fade, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple huddled together inside their cabin and waited”. What could be the Allisons expecting? What could the residents know? Whenever I revisit the writer’s unnerving and influential tale, I remember that the top terror comes from that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this short story a couple journey to a typical beach community where church bells toll constantly, an incessant ringing that is irritating and puzzling. The opening very scary episode takes place after dark, when they decide to go for a stroll and they can’t find the sea. Sand is present, the scent exists of putrid marine life and seawater, surf is audible, but the water appears spectral, or something else and more dreadful. It is simply insanely sinister and each occasion I visit to a beach at night I think about this tale which spoiled the ocean after dark for me – favorably.

The young couple – the woman is adolescent, he’s not – go back to the hotel and discover the cause of the ringing, during a prolonged scene of confinement, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden meets dance of death chaos. It’s an unnerving meditation regarding craving and decline, a pair of individuals growing old jointly as a couple, the connection and violence and affection in matrimony.

Not only the most frightening, but likely a top example of concise narratives available, and a beloved choice. I experienced it en español, in the debut release of Aickman stories to be published in this country a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates

I read this narrative near the water in France in 2020. Although it was sunny I sensed an icy feeling over me. I also felt the electricity of excitement. I was working on a new project, and I faced a wall. I wasn’t sure if it was possible an effective approach to write some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Going through this book, I saw that there was a way.

Published in 1995, the book is a dark flight into the thoughts of a young serial killer, Quentin P, based on a notorious figure, the criminal who murdered and mutilated multiple victims in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, this person was fixated with creating a compliant victim who would never leave with him and carried out several grisly attempts to do so.

The acts the novel describes are terrible, but similarly terrifying is its psychological persuasiveness. The character’s dreadful, broken reality is simply narrated in spare prose, details omitted. The audience is immersed stuck in his mind, compelled to witness thoughts and actions that appal. The strangeness of his psyche feels like a bodily jolt – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Entering Zombie is less like reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from a gifted writer

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and later started suffering from bad dreams. Once, the terror featured a nightmare where I was stuck within an enclosure and, as I roused, I realized that I had ripped a piece out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That house was decaying; when it rained heavily the ground floor corridor became inundated, maggots dropped from above into the bedroom, and once a sizeable vermin climbed the drapes in the bedroom.

When a friend handed me the story, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the story about the home high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to me, nostalgic as I was. It’s a novel about a haunted clamorous, atmospheric home and a female character who ingests calcium from the shoreline. I adored the novel deeply and went back frequently to its pages, each time discovering {something