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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I discovered this narrative years ago and it has stayed with me ever since. The titular vacationers happen to be a couple from New York, who rent the same remote rural cabin every summer. During this visit, in place of returning to the city, they opt to extend their vacation a few more weeks – something that seems to unsettle all the locals in the surrounding community. Everyone conveys the same veiled caution that nobody has remained by the water past Labor Day. Regardless, the Allisons are determined to remain, and that’s when things start to get increasingly weird. The man who brings fuel declines to provide for them. No one is willing to supply groceries to the cabin, and as they try to go to the village, their vehicle won’t start. A tempest builds, the batteries of their radio diminish, and when night comes, “the elderly couple clung to each other within their rental and waited”. What could be they waiting for? What do the townspeople understand? Every time I read the writer’s unnerving and thought-provoking story, I’m reminded that the top terror stems from what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by a noted author

In this concise narrative a pair journey to an ordinary seaside town where church bells toll continuously, a perpetual pealing that is irritating and inexplicable. The opening very scary scene takes place after dark, at the time they choose to take a walk and they can’t find the water. The beach is there, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and brine, surf is audible, but the water appears spectral, or something else and more dreadful. It is simply deeply malevolent and every time I travel to a beach after dark I think about this tale that ruined the sea at night to my mind – in a good way.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – go back to the inn and find out the cause of the ringing, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and demise and innocence encounters danse macabre bedlam. It’s a chilling contemplation on desire and decline, two people aging together as a couple, the connection and violence and affection within wedlock.

Not just the scariest, but likely a top example of concise narratives out there, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in Spanish, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to appear locally a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this narrative near the water in France recently. Despite the sunshine I felt a chill over me. I also felt the thrill of fascination. I was composing my latest book, and I had hit a block. I was uncertain whether there existed a proper method to compose some of the fearful things the story includes. Going through this book, I realized that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the novel is a grim journey into the thoughts of a murderer, Quentin P, modeled after an infamous individual, the criminal who killed and cut apart numerous individuals in a city between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, this person was obsessed with producing a zombie sex slave who would never leave by his side and carried out several grisly attempts to achieve this.

The deeds the story tells are terrible, but just as scary is its own mental realism. The character’s awful, fragmented world is plainly told using minimal words, details omitted. The audience is immersed trapped in his consciousness, compelled to witness thoughts and actions that appal. The strangeness of his psyche is like a bodily jolt – or getting lost on a desolate planet. Entering this book is less like reading but a complete immersion. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from a gifted writer

During my youth, I sleepwalked and later started experiencing nightmares. On one occasion, the horror featured a vision during which I was stuck in a box and, as I roused, I found that I had torn off a part off the window, seeking to leave. That building was crumbling; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall became inundated, fly larvae fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and on one occasion a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in that space.

Once a companion presented me with the story, I had moved out in my childhood residence, but the narrative of the house located on the coastline seemed recognizable in my view, longing as I was. It is a story concerning a ghostly clamorous, atmospheric home and a girl who eats limestone from the cliffs. I adored the book deeply and returned frequently to its pages, consistently uncovering {something