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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by a master of suspense

I discovered this story years ago and it has lingered with me ever since. The titular “summer people” are the Allisons from the city, who rent the same isolated lakeside house every summer. During this visit, rather than heading back to urban life, they decide to prolong their stay a few more weeks – an action that appears to unsettle all the locals in the nearby town. All pass on the same veiled caution that not a soul has ever stayed by the water past Labor Day. Regardless, they insist to not leave, and that’s when events begin to become stranger. The individual who delivers oil declines to provide to the couple. Nobody is willing to supply food to their home, and as they try to go to the village, their vehicle fails to start. A storm gathers, the batteries within the device die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people clung to each other in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What are this couple expecting? What do the residents know? Whenever I revisit Jackson’s disturbing and inspiring tale, I recall that the best horror originates in that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes by a noted author

In this short story a pair go to an ordinary beach community where bells ring continuously, a perpetual pealing that is irritating and unexplainable. The opening truly frightening scene occurs during the evening, when they choose to take a walk and they are unable to locate the water. The beach is there, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and salt, surf is audible, but the ocean seems phantom, or a different entity and worse. It’s just deeply malevolent and each occasion I go to a beach at night I think about this tale which spoiled the sea at night for me – in a good way.

The newlyweds – the wife is youthful, the husband is older – return to the inn and discover the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and death-and-the-maiden encounters danse macabre pandemonium. It is a disturbing contemplation on desire and decline, two people aging together as partners, the attachment and aggression and affection within wedlock.

Not just the most terrifying, but perhaps one of the best brief tales available, and a beloved choice. I experienced it in Spanish, in the initial publication of these tales to be published in this country in 2011.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this book near the water in France in 2020. Despite the sunshine I sensed an icy feeling through me. I also experienced the thrill of excitement. I was working on a new project, and I had hit a block. I was uncertain if it was possible an effective approach to craft certain terrifying elements the book contains. Experiencing this novel, I realized that it could be done.

Released decades ago, the story is a dark flight through the mind of a young serial killer, Quentin P, based on an infamous individual, the murderer who slaughtered and dismembered multiple victims in a city between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, the killer was obsessed with making a zombie sex slave who would stay with him and attempted numerous horrific efforts to do so.

The actions the story tells are horrific, but similarly terrifying is its own psychological persuasiveness. The protagonist’s terrible, shattered existence is simply narrated using minimal words, names redacted. The audience is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, obliged to observe mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The foreignness of his thinking resembles a bodily jolt – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Starting this book feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I walked in my sleep and later started having night terrors. On one occasion, the terror featured a nightmare where I was confined in a box and, upon awakening, I found that I had torn off a part out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That building was falling apart; during heavy rain the entranceway flooded, fly larvae dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and at one time a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in that space.

Once a companion presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere in my childhood residence, but the tale regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to me, longing as I was. This is a story featuring a possessed noisy, emotional house and a female character who consumes calcium off the rocks. I adored the story deeply and came back repeatedly to it, each time discovering {something