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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by a master of suspense

I encountered this tale years ago and it has haunted me from that moment. The so-called vacationers happen to be a family urban dwellers, who occupy a particular isolated rural cabin every summer. This time, instead of going back home, they decide to lengthen their holiday for a month longer – something that seems to disturb each resident in the adjacent village. Each repeats a similar vague warning that nobody has lingered in the area after the holiday. Even so, the couple are resolved to remain, and that is the moment events begin to become stranger. The person who supplies fuel declines to provide to them. Not a single person agrees to bring supplies to the cottage, and at the time the Allisons attempt to go to the village, their vehicle fails to start. Bad weather approaches, the power of their radio die, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals clung to each other in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What could be the Allisons expecting? What might the locals understand? Whenever I revisit the writer’s unnerving and thought-provoking tale, I remember that the finest fright comes from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from a noted author

In this short story a couple travel to a common beach community where bells ring continuously, a perpetual pealing that is annoying and unexplainable. The initial truly frightening scene happens at night, at the time they opt to take a walk and they fail to see the water. There’s sand, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and brine, waves crash, but the water seems phantom, or another thing and even more alarming. It’s just profoundly ominous and whenever I go to a beach in the evening I remember this tale which spoiled the sea at night to my mind – positively.

The young couple – the woman is adolescent, the husband is older – head back to the hotel and discover why the bells ring, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, necro-orgy and demise and innocence meets grim ballet chaos. It’s an unnerving contemplation about longing and decay, two people aging together as partners, the attachment and aggression and affection of marriage.

Not merely the most terrifying, but probably among the finest concise narratives in existence, and a beloved choice. I experienced it in Spanish, in the first edition of these tales to be released locally several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I read this book by a pool in the French countryside recently. Even with the bright weather I felt a chill within me. I also experienced the electricity of fascination. I was working on my latest book, and I faced a wall. I wasn’t sure if there was an effective approach to craft various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Experiencing this novel, I saw that it was possible.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a bleak exploration within the psyche of a murderer, the main character, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who murdered and dismembered multiple victims in a city between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, the killer was fixated with creating a submissive individual who would stay him and attempted numerous grisly attempts to accomplish it.

The acts the story tells are appalling, but equally frightening is its emotional authenticity. The character’s terrible, broken reality is simply narrated with concise language, names redacted. The audience is plunged caught in his thoughts, forced to observe thoughts and actions that appal. The foreignness of his thinking feels like a bodily jolt – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Going into this story feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I was a somnambulist and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. Once, the horror involved a dream during which I was trapped within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had removed a piece off the window, attempting to escape. That building was decaying; when storms came the entranceway became inundated, fly larvae dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a big rodent scaled the curtains in that space.

When a friend handed me the story, I was no longer living with my parents, but the story of the house perched on the cliffs felt familiar in my view, nostalgic as I was. This is a story featuring a possessed noisy, emotional house and a girl who eats limestone off the rocks. I adored the book so much and went back repeatedly to it, each time discovering {something