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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I encountered this story some time back and it has haunted me ever since. The named “summer people” happen to be a family from the city, who rent the same off-grid country cottage each year. During this visit, rather than returning home, they decide to prolong their stay for a month longer – an action that appears to disturb everyone in the adjacent village. Each repeats the same veiled caution that nobody has ever stayed in the area beyond the end of summer. Regardless, the Allisons insist to remain, and that’s when things start to get increasingly weird. The individual who brings oil won’t sell for them. Nobody will deliver food to their home, and when the family attempt to drive into town, their vehicle fails to start. A storm gathers, the batteries within the device fade, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals huddled together inside their cabin and waited”. What are they expecting? What do the locals know? Each occasion I peruse this author’s unnerving and thought-provoking story, I remember that the best horror originates in that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this short story a couple journey to a typical coastal village in which chimes sound constantly, a constant chiming that is bothersome and puzzling. The first truly frightening moment occurs at night, when they choose to go for a stroll and they can’t find the water. Sand is present, there is the odor of rotting fish and seawater, there are waves, but the water is a ghost, or another thing and even more alarming. It is truly profoundly ominous and each occasion I travel to the coast at night I remember this tale which spoiled the ocean after dark for me – in a good way.

The recent spouses – the wife is youthful, he’s not – head back to the hotel and learn the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and mortality and youth meets dance of death bedlam. It is a disturbing meditation about longing and decay, a pair of individuals maturing in tandem as a couple, the attachment and violence and gentleness in matrimony.

Not only the scariest, but likely one of the best short stories available, and an individual preference. I experienced it in Spanish, in the debut release of Aickman stories to be published in Argentina a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this narrative near the water in the French countryside in 2020. Even with the bright weather I experienced cold creep through me. Additionally, I sensed the thrill of anticipation. I was working on a new project, and I had hit an obstacle. I was uncertain if it was possible a proper method to compose various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Going through this book, I understood that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the story is a bleak exploration within the psyche of a murderer, the protagonist, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who murdered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in the Midwest over a decade. Notoriously, Dahmer was fixated with making a zombie sex slave who would never leave him and attempted numerous macabre trials to do so.

The actions the story tells are terrible, but similarly terrifying is the emotional authenticity. Quentin P’s awful, broken reality is directly described in spare prose, identities hidden. The audience is plunged caught in his thoughts, compelled to witness ideas and deeds that horrify. The foreignness of his mind feels like a physical shock – or getting lost in an empty realm. Entering this book is less like reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I was a somnambulist and later started suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the terror included a vision in which I was stuck in a box and, as I roused, I discovered that I had removed a part off the window, seeking to leave. That home was crumbling; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall filled with water, fly larvae dropped from above into the bedroom, and once a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in my sister’s room.

When a friend presented me with this author’s book, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the narrative about the home perched on the cliffs appeared known in my view, longing as I felt. This is a novel concerning a ghostly noisy, atmospheric home and a young woman who consumes calcium from the cliffs. I cherished the book so much and came back again and again to its pages, always finding {something