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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I encountered this story years ago and it has haunted me from that moment. The titular seasonal visitors are the Allisons urban dwellers, who rent a particular isolated country cottage each year. On this occasion, instead of heading back to urban life, they decide to extend their vacation a few more weeks – an action that appears to disturb all the locals in the adjacent village. Each repeats an identical cryptic advice that no one has ever stayed by the water after the end of summer. Even so, the couple are resolved to not leave, and that is the moment situations commence to grow more bizarre. The individual who delivers oil refuses to sell to them. No one agrees to bring supplies to the cabin, and when the Allisons endeavor to travel to the community, their vehicle refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the power within the device diminish, and when night comes, “the two old people clung to each other inside their cabin and expected”. What are this couple anticipating? What might the townspeople be aware of? Each occasion I peruse this author’s chilling and influential story, I recall that the best horror originates in that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this short story two people go to an ordinary seaside town in which chimes sound continuously, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and puzzling. The first very scary episode occurs at night, at the time they decide to take a walk and they are unable to locate the sea. The beach is there, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and brine, surf is audible, but the sea is a ghost, or a different entity and even more alarming. It’s just deeply malevolent and whenever I visit to the shore in the evening I remember this tale that destroyed the beach in the evening in my view – in a good way.

The recent spouses – the wife is youthful, the husband is older – head back to their lodging and discover the cause of the ringing, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and demise and innocence encounters grim ballet chaos. It is a disturbing meditation on desire and deterioration, a pair of individuals growing old jointly as partners, the bond and violence and tenderness within wedlock.

Not just the most terrifying, but likely among the finest concise narratives out there, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in Spanish, in the debut release of these tales to be published locally several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from an esteemed writer

I perused this book by a pool overseas in 2020. Although it was sunny I felt an icy feeling within me. I also experienced the excitement of anticipation. I was writing a new project, and I had hit an obstacle. I didn’t know whether there existed a proper method to write certain terrifying elements the book contains. Reading Zombie, I saw that it was possible.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a dark flight into the thoughts of a criminal, the protagonist, based on an infamous individual, the serial killer who slaughtered and cut apart multiple victims in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, this person was obsessed with making a zombie sex slave who would stay with him and attempted numerous grisly attempts to achieve this.

The actions the book depicts are terrible, but similarly terrifying is the psychological persuasiveness. The protagonist’s awful, broken reality is simply narrated with concise language, details omitted. You is immersed stuck in his mind, compelled to see thoughts and actions that appal. The alien nature of his psyche feels like a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Going into this story is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

During my youth, I walked in my sleep and subsequently commenced having night terrors. On one occasion, the fear featured a nightmare during which I was confined in a box and, as I roused, I realized that I had removed the slat out of the window frame, trying to get out. That house was crumbling; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall flooded, insect eggs dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and once a sizeable vermin climbed the drapes in that space.

When a friend presented me with this author’s book, I was no longer living at my family home, but the narrative about the home high on the Dover cliffs appeared known to myself, nostalgic as I felt. It’s a novel featuring a possessed clamorous, emotional house and a young woman who eats calcium from the cliffs. I adored the novel immensely and came back frequently to it, always finding {something