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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I encountered this story years ago and it has lingered with me ever since. The titular “summer people” are the Allisons from New York, who rent an identical isolated country cottage annually. On this occasion, rather than going back home, they decide to extend their holiday a few more weeks – a decision that to unsettle each resident in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys the same veiled caution that nobody has lingered in the area beyond the end of summer. Nonetheless, they insist to not leave, and that is the moment things start to become stranger. The person who supplies oil won’t sell to them. No one is willing to supply supplies to their home, and at the time the Allisons try to go to the village, the automobile refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the batteries in the radio die, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple clung to each other in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What are this couple waiting for? What could the residents know? Every time I revisit Jackson’s disturbing and influential story, I’m reminded that the best horror comes from that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this short story two people travel to a typical seaside town where bells ring continuously, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and puzzling. The initial extremely terrifying scene takes place at night, at the time they decide to take a walk and they are unable to locate the sea. Sand is present, the scent exists of decaying seafood and brine, there are waves, but the water seems phantom, or another thing and worse. It’s just insanely sinister and every time I travel to the coast after dark I remember this narrative that destroyed the ocean after dark for me – positively.

The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, he’s not – go back to their lodging and find out why the bells ring, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and demise and innocence intersects with dance of death chaos. It is a disturbing reflection regarding craving and deterioration, a pair of individuals growing old jointly as partners, the bond and aggression and affection in matrimony.

Not only the scariest, but likely one of the best short stories out there, and an individual preference. I experienced it in Spanish, in the first edition of these tales to appear in this country several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I delved into this book beside the swimming area overseas a few years ago. Although it was sunny I sensed a chill over me. I also experienced the electricity of anticipation. I was working on a new project, and I encountered an obstacle. I wasn’t sure whether there existed an effective approach to craft certain terrifying elements the book contains. Reading Zombie, I saw that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a bleak exploration through the mind of a criminal, the protagonist, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who killed and dismembered numerous individuals in a city between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, Dahmer was consumed with making a zombie sex slave who would stay with him and made many macabre trials to accomplish it.

The actions the novel describes are terrible, but similarly terrifying is the mental realism. The protagonist’s awful, shattered existence is plainly told in spare prose, names redacted. The reader is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, obliged to witness ideas and deeds that horrify. The foreignness of his psyche feels like a physical shock – or getting lost in an empty realm. Entering this story feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

When I was a child, I sleepwalked and later started having night terrors. Once, the fear involved a dream where I was trapped within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I realized that I had removed the slat out of the window frame, trying to get out. That home was falling apart; when storms came the ground floor corridor filled with water, maggots dropped from above into the bedroom, and on one occasion a big rodent ascended the window coverings in that space.

Once a companion presented me with the story, I was no longer living with my parents, but the narrative regarding the building located on the coastline appeared known in my view, longing as I felt. It’s a novel featuring a possessed noisy, sentimental building and a young woman who consumes chalk from the cliffs. I cherished the book so much and returned again and again to the story, consistently uncovering {something