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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from a master of suspense

I read this narrative some time back and it has lingered with me ever since. The titular seasonal visitors happen to be a couple urban dwellers, who occupy a particular isolated rural cabin every summer. On this occasion, rather than returning to the city, they choose to prolong their stay a few more weeks – a decision that to disturb everyone in the nearby town. Each repeats a similar vague warning that not a soul has lingered by the water beyond the end of summer. Nonetheless, they insist to stay, and that is the moment events begin to get increasingly weird. The man who brings fuel declines to provide to them. Not a single person will deliver food to the cabin, and at the time the family endeavor to drive into town, their vehicle won’t start. A tempest builds, the energy of their radio fade, and when night comes, “the two old people huddled together in their summer cottage and expected”. What are they anticipating? What might the townspeople be aware of? Every time I revisit the writer’s chilling and thought-provoking story, I remember that the top terror stems from the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a couple travel to an ordinary coastal village where church bells toll the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and puzzling. The initial extremely terrifying scene happens at night, when they decide to go for a stroll and they can’t find the sea. The beach is there, the scent exists of decaying seafood and salt, there are waves, but the sea is a ghost, or something else and even more alarming. It is truly insanely sinister and every time I go to the coast after dark I recall this tale that destroyed the beach in the evening in my view – in a good way.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – head back to the hotel and learn the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of confinement, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth meets grim ballet chaos. It is a disturbing contemplation on desire and deterioration, a pair of individuals aging together as partners, the connection and brutality and tenderness within wedlock.

Not only the scariest, but perhaps a top example of brief tales out there, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of this author’s works to be released in this country several years back.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this narrative by a pool overseas in 2020. Although it was sunny I sensed an icy feeling through me. I also experienced the thrill of fascination. I was composing my third novel, and I encountered an obstacle. I was uncertain if there was any good way to craft certain terrifying elements the book contains. Going through this book, I realized that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the story is a grim journey within the psyche of a young serial killer, the main character, based on an infamous individual, the serial killer who murdered and mutilated numerous individuals in the Midwest over a decade. Notoriously, Dahmer was fixated with making a submissive individual that would remain him and attempted numerous horrific efforts to accomplish it.

The deeds the book depicts are appalling, but similarly terrifying is its emotional authenticity. Quentin P’s terrible, broken reality is simply narrated in spare prose, details omitted. The audience is immersed caught in his thoughts, obliged to observe thoughts and actions that appal. The strangeness of his psyche is like a tangible impact – or being stranded in an empty realm. Entering Zombie is less like reading than a full body experience. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and later started experiencing nightmares. Once, the fear featured a dream where I was confined in a box and, when I woke up, I realized that I had removed a piece off the window, seeking to leave. That house was falling apart; when storms came the ground floor corridor became inundated, fly larvae came down from the roof into the bedroom, and on one occasion a big rodent scaled the curtains in that space.

After an acquaintance presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere in my childhood residence, but the story of the house perched on the cliffs appeared known to myself, longing as I was. It is a novel about a haunted noisy, sentimental building and a young woman who eats chalk from the cliffs. I adored the novel immensely and came back again and again to it, each time discovering {something