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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I encountered this narrative some time back and it has stayed with me from that moment. The named “summer people” turn out to be a family urban dwellers, who occupy an identical off-grid country cottage every summer. During this visit, rather than heading back to urban life, they choose to lengthen their stay an extra month – something that seems to disturb each resident in the surrounding community. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that nobody has lingered by the water past the holiday. Nonetheless, they are resolved to stay, and that is the moment events begin to become stranger. The individual who supplies the kerosene declines to provide to them. Not a single person will deliver groceries to the cottage, and at the time they attempt to drive into town, the automobile won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the batteries in the radio diminish, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals clung to each other in their summer cottage and waited”. What might be the Allisons waiting for? What might the residents understand? Whenever I revisit the writer’s disturbing and inspiring narrative, I remember that the top terror comes from that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a couple travel to a typical coastal village where church bells toll constantly, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and puzzling. The opening extremely terrifying moment happens after dark, when they choose to go for a stroll and they can’t find the water. The beach is there, the scent exists of decaying seafood and seawater, there are waves, but the water appears spectral, or something else and more dreadful. It’s just deeply malevolent and every time I visit to a beach after dark I recall this story that ruined the sea at night to my mind – positively.

The newlyweds – she’s very young, the husband is older – go back to the hotel and learn why the bells ring, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth intersects with grim ballet bedlam. It is a disturbing meditation regarding craving and decline, two people maturing in tandem as spouses, the bond and violence and affection within wedlock.

Not only the most terrifying, but perhaps one of the best brief tales available, and an individual preference. I encountered it en español, in the first edition of this author’s works to be published in Argentina several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into Zombie by a pool in the French countryside a few years ago. Although it was sunny I felt a chill within me. I also experienced the electricity of fascination. I was working on my third novel, and I had hit a block. I didn’t know whether there existed a proper method to craft some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I saw that it was possible.

Published in 1995, the novel is a bleak exploration into the thoughts of a criminal, the protagonist, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who killed and mutilated 17 young men and boys in a city over a decade. As is well-known, Dahmer was obsessed with producing a compliant victim who would never leave with him and attempted numerous grisly attempts to do so.

The deeds the book depicts are terrible, but similarly terrifying is its psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s dreadful, fragmented world is directly described with concise language, identities hidden. The audience is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, forced to witness mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The strangeness of his psyche resembles a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Going into this book is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from a gifted writer

When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and eventually began experiencing nightmares. At one point, the fear featured a vision in which I was stuck inside a container and, as I roused, I found that I had torn off a piece from the window, attempting to escape. That home was falling apart; when storms came the ground floor corridor became inundated, insect eggs came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in my sister’s room.

Once a companion handed me the story, I was no longer living with my parents, but the tale of the house located on the coastline felt familiar in my view, longing as I was. It is a novel concerning a ghostly noisy, sentimental building and a girl who consumes limestone from the cliffs. I cherished the story deeply and came back repeatedly to the story, always finding {something