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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I read this story long ago and it has stayed with me from that moment. The titular vacationers turn out to be the Allisons from the city, who occupy a particular remote country cottage annually. During this visit, in place of returning to urban life, they decide to prolong their holiday a few more weeks – a decision that to disturb all the locals in the adjacent village. All pass on a similar vague warning that nobody has remained in the area after Labor Day. Regardless, they are resolved to remain, and that is the moment events begin to grow more bizarre. The individual who delivers the kerosene declines to provide to the couple. Nobody agrees to bring food to their home, and at the time they endeavor to travel to the community, the car won’t start. A tempest builds, the energy of their radio die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple huddled together in their summer cottage and waited”. What could be this couple waiting for? What might the townspeople know? Every time I peruse this author’s unnerving and thought-provoking story, I’m reminded that the best horror stems from the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes from a noted author

In this short story two people travel to a typical seaside town in which chimes sound the whole time, an incessant ringing that is irritating and puzzling. The opening extremely terrifying moment takes place at night, as they choose to walk around and they can’t find the sea. Sand is present, there is the odor of decaying seafood and brine, there are waves, but the water is a ghost, or another thing and even more alarming. It is truly deeply malevolent and each occasion I go to the shore in the evening I think about this tale which spoiled the ocean after dark for me – in a good way.

The newlyweds – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – go back to the inn and discover the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of confinement, macabre revelry and demise and innocence encounters grim ballet pandemonium. It’s a chilling reflection about longing and decline, a pair of individuals maturing in tandem as partners, the connection and brutality and affection in matrimony.

Not just the most frightening, but probably one of the best brief tales in existence, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to be released locally a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I perused this book near the water in the French countryside a few years ago. Despite the sunshine I experienced cold creep over me. I also felt the thrill of fascination. I was composing a new project, and I faced an obstacle. I was uncertain whether there existed a proper method to craft certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Experiencing this novel, I understood that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the story is a grim journey into the thoughts of a murderer, the main character, modeled after an infamous individual, the murderer who killed and cut apart numerous individuals in Milwaukee during a specific period. Infamously, Dahmer was consumed with making a zombie sex slave who would never leave him and attempted numerous macabre trials to achieve this.

The acts the book depicts are horrific, but similarly terrifying is its own emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s terrible, broken reality is simply narrated using minimal words, names redacted. The audience is plunged trapped in his consciousness, compelled to witness thoughts and actions that shock. The foreignness of his thinking resembles a tangible impact – or finding oneself isolated on a desolate planet. Starting Zombie feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching from a gifted writer

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and later started suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the horror featured a vision where I was stuck within an enclosure and, upon awakening, I found that I had removed a piece out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That house was crumbling; when storms came the entranceway flooded, insect eggs dropped from above into the bedroom, and once a large rat scaled the curtains in that space.

After an acquaintance presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living with my parents, but the story about the home high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar in my view, homesick as I felt. It is a novel about a haunted clamorous, sentimental building and a young woman who eats calcium from the shoreline. I cherished the book so much and came back frequently to its pages, always finding {something