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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I encountered this narrative long ago and it has haunted me ever since. The so-called seasonal visitors are a family from New York, who occupy the same remote rural cabin each year. During this visit, in place of heading back to the city, they decide to lengthen their stay an extra month – an action that appears to disturb everyone in the adjacent village. Each repeats a similar vague warning that not a soul has ever stayed in the area after the end of summer. Even so, they are determined to not leave, and that’s when things start to get increasingly weird. The individual who supplies the kerosene won’t sell to the couple. Not a single person agrees to bring food to the cabin, and as the Allisons try to go to the village, the automobile refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the power of their radio fade, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple clung to each other within their rental and waited”. What might be this couple expecting? What do the locals know? Whenever I peruse Jackson’s disturbing and thought-provoking narrative, I remember that the top terror stems from that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a couple travel to a common beach community where bells ring constantly, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and puzzling. The opening very scary scene takes place at night, as they opt to walk around and they are unable to locate the sea. The beach is there, there’s the smell of rotting fish and brine, there are waves, but the sea is a ghost, or a different entity and worse. It is simply insanely sinister and each occasion I go to the coast in the evening I think about this story that destroyed the ocean after dark in my view – favorably.

The recent spouses – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – head back to the hotel and find out the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and death-and-the-maiden encounters danse macabre chaos. It’s a chilling contemplation on desire and decay, a pair of individuals aging together as spouses, the connection and brutality and gentleness in matrimony.

Not merely the most frightening, but perhaps a top example of concise narratives available, and a beloved choice. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of this author’s works to be released in Argentina several years back.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates

I read this narrative near the water overseas a few years ago. Although it was sunny I felt a chill within me. I also experienced the electricity of fascination. I was working on a new project, and I faced a block. I wasn’t sure whether there existed an effective approach to write some of the fearful things the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I saw that it was possible.

Published in 1995, the novel is a dark flight within the psyche of a murderer, the protagonist, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who slaughtered and dismembered numerous individuals in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, Dahmer was fixated with producing a compliant victim who would never leave him and attempted numerous macabre trials to accomplish it.

The acts the book depicts are horrific, but similarly terrifying is its own emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s dreadful, shattered existence is simply narrated with concise language, names redacted. The reader is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, forced to observe thoughts and actions that shock. The foreignness of his thinking feels like a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Entering this book is not just reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from a gifted writer

During my youth, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced having night terrors. At one point, the horror featured a vision in which I was trapped inside a container and, as I roused, I found that I had torn off a piece out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That building was crumbling; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall filled with water, maggots came down from the roof into the bedroom, and on one occasion a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in that space.

After an acquaintance handed me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out at my family home, but the tale about the home perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable in my view, homesick as I felt. This is a story concerning a ghostly noisy, sentimental building and a young woman who ingests limestone from the shoreline. I loved the book immensely and came back again and again to it, consistently uncovering {something