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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by a master of suspense

I encountered this tale some time back and it has haunted me ever since. The named “summer people” turn out to be a couple from the city, who occupy the same isolated lakeside house annually. On this occasion, rather than returning to the city, they opt to prolong their vacation a few more weeks – an action that appears to disturb all the locals in the surrounding community. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that nobody has ever stayed at the lake beyond Labor Day. Regardless, they are resolved to stay, and that is the moment situations commence to get increasingly weird. The individual who supplies oil refuses to sell for them. Nobody agrees to bring groceries to the cabin, and as the Allisons try to go to the village, their vehicle won’t start. A tempest builds, the power of their radio die, and when night comes, “the two old people clung to each other inside their cabin and anticipated”. What might be this couple anticipating? What might the residents know? Each occasion I revisit the writer’s disturbing and inspiring tale, I remember that the best horror originates in the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a couple go to a typical coastal village where bells ring continuously, a perpetual pealing that is irritating and unexplainable. The opening extremely terrifying scene takes place at night, at the time they opt to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the ocean. Sand is present, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and seawater, surf is audible, but the water appears spectral, or a different entity and worse. It’s just insanely sinister and each occasion I travel to a beach after dark I recall this story which spoiled the beach in the evening for me – in a good way.

The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, the husband is older – return to the inn and discover why the bells ring, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and demise and innocence encounters grim ballet chaos. It’s an unnerving reflection regarding craving and decay, two people growing old jointly as spouses, the connection and aggression and gentleness of marriage.

Not just the most terrifying, but likely one of the best short stories available, and an individual preference. I encountered it in Spanish, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to be published in Argentina a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this book beside the swimming area in the French countryside in 2020. Although it was sunny I experienced cold creep within me. I also felt the excitement of anticipation. I was working on a new project, and I faced a block. I didn’t know if there was an effective approach to craft various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I realized that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a bleak exploration within the psyche of a young serial killer, the main character, based on an infamous individual, the murderer who killed and dismembered multiple victims in a city over a decade. As is well-known, Dahmer was obsessed with creating a submissive individual who would never leave him and made many horrific efforts to accomplish it.

The acts the novel describes are appalling, but just as scary is its emotional authenticity. Quentin P’s awful, shattered existence is simply narrated with concise language, details omitted. The reader is immersed trapped in his consciousness, obliged to observe thoughts and actions that shock. The foreignness of his psyche feels like a physical shock – or getting lost on a desolate planet. Going into this book is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and later started experiencing nightmares. On one occasion, the terror involved a vision in which I was stuck in a box and, upon awakening, I realized that I had torn off the slat off the window, trying to get out. That home was decaying; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall filled with water, maggots fell from the ceiling on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a big rodent ascended the window coverings in that space.

Once a companion gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out in my childhood residence, but the story regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs appeared known to me, nostalgic as I felt. This is a story concerning a ghostly noisy, emotional house and a girl who ingests calcium from the cliffs. I cherished the story deeply and returned frequently to its pages, consistently uncovering {something