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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by a master of suspense

I encountered this story some time back and it has lingered with me since then. The titular “summer people” turn out to be a couple urban dwellers, who occupy a particular off-grid country cottage annually. This time, rather than going back to urban life, they choose to lengthen their holiday a few more weeks – a decision that to disturb each resident in the nearby town. All pass on a similar vague warning that no one has lingered by the water after Labor Day. Even so, they are determined to stay, and that is the moment things start to get increasingly weird. The individual who supplies fuel won’t sell for them. No one agrees to bring groceries to their home, and as they attempt to travel to the community, their vehicle fails to start. A tempest builds, the batteries of their radio die, and when night comes, “the aged individuals clung to each other in their summer cottage and waited”. What are this couple waiting for? What could the locals know? Every time I peruse Jackson’s disturbing and influential narrative, I remember that the finest fright stems from the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a pair travel to an ordinary beach community where church bells toll continuously, an incessant ringing that is irritating and puzzling. The initial extremely terrifying episode happens during the evening, at the time they decide to walk around and they are unable to locate the ocean. Sand is present, the scent exists of decaying seafood and brine, surf is audible, but the ocean appears spectral, or a different entity and more dreadful. It’s just deeply malevolent and whenever I visit to the shore at night I recall this narrative that ruined the ocean after dark for me – in a good way.

The young couple – the woman is adolescent, he’s not – return to the hotel and learn the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden intersects with grim ballet bedlam. It is a disturbing reflection about longing and decay, two people aging together as a couple, the bond and brutality and affection in matrimony.

Not only the scariest, but probably among the finest short stories available, and a beloved choice. I read it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to be published in this country several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from an esteemed writer

I read this book by a pool overseas in 2020. Despite the sunshine I sensed cold creep through me. Additionally, I sensed the thrill of anticipation. I was writing my latest book, and I faced a block. I was uncertain if it was possible an effective approach to write various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I realized that it could be done.

Published in 1995, the story is a bleak exploration within the psyche of a murderer, the protagonist, modeled after an infamous individual, the serial killer who slaughtered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee over a decade. As is well-known, Dahmer was obsessed with producing a submissive individual that would remain him and made many horrific efforts to do so.

The acts the novel describes are terrible, but similarly terrifying is its mental realism. The character’s terrible, broken reality is directly described in spare prose, details omitted. You is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, obliged to witness ideas and deeds that horrify. The strangeness of his psyche resembles a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated on a desolate planet. Going into this story is not just reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and eventually began experiencing nightmares. At one point, the horror included a vision where I was stuck within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I found that I had removed the slat from the window, attempting to escape. That building was crumbling; during heavy rain the ground floor corridor became inundated, maggots fell from the ceiling onto the bed, and on one occasion a big rodent climbed the drapes in the bedroom.

Once a companion presented me with this author’s book, I had moved out in my childhood residence, but the narrative of the house perched on the cliffs appeared known to myself, homesick at that time. It is a novel about a haunted noisy, atmospheric home and a girl who eats limestone off the rocks. I loved the story deeply and came back repeatedly to its pages, consistently uncovering {something