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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by a master of suspense

I read this story long ago and it has stayed with me from that moment. The so-called vacationers are the Allisons urban dwellers, who occupy a particular off-grid country cottage each year. This time, in place of going back home, they decide to prolong their holiday an extra month – a decision that to disturb each resident in the nearby town. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that not a soul has lingered at the lake past Labor Day. Regardless, the Allisons are resolved to not leave, and that’s when events begin to get increasingly weird. The individual who delivers oil declines to provide to them. Nobody is willing to supply food to the cottage, and as they attempt to travel to the community, the car fails to start. A storm gathers, the power in the radio fade, and when night comes, “the aged individuals clung to each other in their summer cottage and expected”. What could be they expecting? What might the locals be aware of? Whenever I read this author’s unnerving and influential narrative, I recall that the best horror originates in what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this short story two people journey to a common coastal village where church bells toll the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is annoying and puzzling. The initial truly frightening episode occurs during the evening, as they choose to go for a stroll and they fail to see the sea. The beach is there, the scent exists of rotting fish and brine, there are waves, but the water seems phantom, or a different entity and even more alarming. It is truly deeply malevolent and every time I visit to the coast in the evening I think about this story which spoiled the sea at night in my view – favorably.

The recent spouses – the wife is youthful, the husband is older – head back to their lodging and learn why the bells ring, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and mortality and youth encounters grim ballet pandemonium. It’s a chilling reflection about longing and decline, a pair of individuals maturing in tandem as partners, the attachment and violence and tenderness in matrimony.

Not only the most frightening, but likely among the finest concise narratives in existence, and a personal favourite. I read it en español, in the initial publication of this author’s works to be published in Argentina in 2011.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I perused Zombie by a pool in France in 2020. Although it was sunny I felt cold creep within me. I also felt the electricity of fascination. I was composing my latest book, and I had hit a wall. I was uncertain whether there existed an effective approach to craft various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Going through this book, I realized that there was a way.

Published in 1995, the story is a grim journey through the mind of a criminal, Quentin P, based on a notorious figure, the criminal who killed and mutilated 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee over a decade. Infamously, this person was fixated with making a compliant victim who would never leave with him and carried out several horrific efforts to do so.

The deeds the book depicts are terrible, but similarly terrifying is its own psychological persuasiveness. The protagonist’s dreadful, broken reality is plainly told with concise language, details omitted. The audience is plunged stuck in his mind, compelled to see thoughts and actions that shock. The strangeness of his mind resembles a bodily jolt – or getting lost in an empty realm. Starting this story is less like reading but a complete immersion. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel by a gifted writer

In my early years, I was a somnambulist and subsequently commenced having night terrors. At one point, the terror featured a dream in which I was confined in a box and, upon awakening, I discovered that I had torn off a part out of the window frame, attempting to escape. That building was crumbling; during heavy rain the entranceway filled with water, fly larvae came down from the roof onto the bed, and at one time a big rodent ascended the window coverings in my sister’s room.

Once a companion handed me this author’s book, I was no longer living at my family home, but the story of the house high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to me, nostalgic at that time. This is a book concerning a ghostly noisy, sentimental building and a young woman who consumes calcium off the rocks. I adored the book so much and came back again and again to the story, consistently uncovering {something