🔗 Share this article

Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from a master of suspense

I discovered this story years ago and it has haunted me from that moment. The so-called “summer people” are a family urban dwellers, who lease a particular off-grid rural cabin each year. During this visit, rather than heading back to urban life, they choose to lengthen their stay an extra month – an action that appears to disturb all the locals in the nearby town. Each repeats a similar vague warning that no one has lingered in the area past Labor Day. Nonetheless, the couple insist to not leave, and that is the moment events begin to grow more bizarre. The person who supplies fuel won’t sell to them. Not a single person will deliver food to their home, and when they endeavor to go to the village, their vehicle fails to start. Bad weather approaches, the batteries in the radio die, and when night comes, “the aged individuals crowded closely inside their cabin and anticipated”. What are they expecting? What could the townspeople be aware of? Whenever I revisit this author’s unnerving and inspiring story, I recall that the best horror stems from the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a pair go to an ordinary seaside town where church bells toll constantly, a perpetual pealing that is irritating and puzzling. The opening very scary episode occurs after dark, as they opt to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the ocean. The beach is there, the scent exists of decaying seafood and seawater, waves crash, but the sea appears spectral, or another thing and even more alarming. It’s just deeply malevolent and whenever I go to a beach at night I recall this story which spoiled the ocean after dark for me – in a good way.

The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, the husband is older – return to the hotel and discover the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and death-and-the-maiden meets grim ballet chaos. It is a disturbing meditation about longing and decay, two people maturing in tandem as spouses, the attachment and violence and gentleness in matrimony.

Not merely the most terrifying, but probably one of the best brief tales in existence, and a beloved choice. I encountered it in Spanish, in the first edition of these tales to be released in Argentina several years back.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I read this book by a pool overseas recently. Even with the bright weather I experienced a chill over me. Additionally, I sensed the electricity of excitement. I was working on my latest book, and I had hit an obstacle. I wasn’t sure if it was possible a proper method to craft various frightening aspects the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I understood that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a bleak exploration into the thoughts of a murderer, Quentin P, modeled after an infamous individual, the murderer who murdered and cut apart numerous individuals in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, this person was obsessed with producing a zombie sex slave who would stay with him and carried out several macabre trials to do so.

The acts the story tells are terrible, but equally frightening is the mental realism. The character’s dreadful, fragmented world is plainly told using minimal words, details omitted. The reader is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, forced to see mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The alien nature of his psyche feels like a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Entering Zombie is less like reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by a gifted writer

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and later started suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the fear involved a dream during which I was stuck within an enclosure and, upon awakening, I discovered that I had ripped the slat from the window, seeking to leave. That home was crumbling; when storms came the ground floor corridor became inundated, insect eggs dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a sizeable vermin climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.

When a friend gave me this author’s book, I had moved out with my parents, but the tale of the house located on the coastline appeared known to myself, longing at that time. This is a story about a haunted loud, atmospheric home and a female character who ingests calcium off the rocks. I loved the novel so much and returned repeatedly to the story, always finding {something