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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I encountered this tale years ago and it has stayed with me since then. The named seasonal visitors are the Allisons from the city, who lease the same isolated rural cabin each year. This time, instead of going back to the city, they opt to lengthen their vacation a few more weeks – a decision that to alarm each resident in the nearby town. Each repeats an identical cryptic advice that no one has lingered at the lake after the holiday. Even so, the couple insist to remain, and that’s when situations commence to get increasingly weird. The person who supplies oil won’t sell to the couple. Not a single person agrees to bring supplies to their home, and as the family endeavor to go to the village, their vehicle fails to start. Bad weather approaches, the power within the device diminish, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals crowded closely inside their cabin and waited”. What are they anticipating? What might the townspeople understand? Every time I read Jackson’s chilling and influential narrative, I remember that the best horror comes from what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes from a noted author

In this short story a couple journey to an ordinary coastal village in which chimes sound continuously, a perpetual pealing that is irritating and unexplainable. The first very scary moment happens during the evening, at the time they opt to walk around and they can’t find the water. The beach is there, there is the odor of decaying seafood and seawater, surf is audible, but the water seems phantom, or something else and more dreadful. It’s just deeply malevolent and every time I travel to the shore in the evening I remember this tale which spoiled the beach in the evening for me – positively.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, he’s not – head back to the inn and find out the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and demise and innocence meets danse macabre bedlam. It is a disturbing contemplation on desire and deterioration, two bodies aging together as spouses, the attachment and violence and tenderness within wedlock.

Not only the most terrifying, but perhaps among the finest brief tales in existence, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of Aickman stories to be published in Argentina a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this book beside the swimming area in France recently. Although it was sunny I sensed a chill over me. I also experienced the thrill of excitement. I was composing my latest book, and I faced an obstacle. I didn’t know if there was a proper method to write some of the fearful things the book contains. Going through this book, I saw that it was possible.

Published in 1995, the novel is a dark flight into the thoughts of a criminal, Quentin P, based on a notorious figure, the murderer who murdered and mutilated multiple victims in a city over a decade. Notoriously, this person was obsessed with creating a submissive individual who would never leave by his side and made many grisly attempts to achieve this.

The actions the story tells are horrific, but just as scary is its own emotional authenticity. Quentin P’s terrible, broken reality is directly described using minimal words, identities hidden. You is immersed stuck in his mind, forced to witness ideas and deeds that appal. The strangeness of his psyche resembles a physical shock – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Entering Zombie is less like reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and subsequently commenced suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the fear included a dream during which I was trapped in a box and, upon awakening, I realized that I had removed a part from the window, trying to get out. That building was crumbling; when storms came the entranceway flooded, insect eggs fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and at one time a large rat climbed the drapes in the bedroom.

When a friend handed me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out in my childhood residence, but the tale of the house high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to me, longing as I was. It’s a novel featuring a possessed noisy, emotional house and a girl who consumes chalk from the shoreline. I adored the novel deeply and went back frequently to it, always finding {something