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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I discovered this narrative years ago and it has haunted me from that moment. The titular seasonal visitors happen to be a couple urban dwellers, who rent an identical remote lakeside house annually. This time, in place of returning home, they opt to extend their holiday an extra month – a decision that to disturb everyone in the surrounding community. All pass on a similar vague warning that nobody has remained in the area past the holiday. Regardless, the couple insist to remain, and that’s when things start to grow more bizarre. The man who brings the kerosene declines to provide for them. No one will deliver groceries to the cabin, and at the time the family try to drive into town, the car fails to start. A tempest builds, the batteries of their radio die, and when night comes, “the aged individuals clung to each other in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What could be they waiting for? What might the townspeople know? Every time I revisit this author’s chilling and thought-provoking narrative, I recall that the best horror originates in the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by a noted author

In this concise narrative a pair journey to a common beach community in which chimes sound continuously, a constant chiming that is bothersome and inexplicable. The first extremely terrifying scene takes place after dark, as they opt to walk around and they fail to see the ocean. Sand is present, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and seawater, surf is audible, but the ocean is a ghost, or another thing and worse. It is simply deeply malevolent and every time I travel to the coast in the evening I recall this story which spoiled the ocean after dark for me – favorably.

The recent spouses – the wife is youthful, the husband is older – return to the hotel and find out the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden intersects with dance of death pandemonium. It’s a chilling contemplation about longing and decay, a pair of individuals growing old jointly as a couple, the attachment and brutality and tenderness within wedlock.

Not merely the scariest, but likely one of the best brief tales in existence, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of these tales to be published locally a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates

I read Zombie by a pool overseas in 2020. Even with the bright weather I sensed a chill through me. I also experienced the thrill of fascination. I was writing a new project, and I encountered a wall. I was uncertain whether there existed an effective approach to compose various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I understood that it could be done.

Released decades ago, the story is a grim journey into the thoughts of a murderer, Quentin P, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who murdered and mutilated 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee over a decade. Infamously, Dahmer was consumed with producing a zombie sex slave who would stay him and attempted numerous horrific efforts to accomplish it.

The acts the book depicts are appalling, but equally frightening is its mental realism. Quentin P’s awful, fragmented world is plainly told with concise language, identities hidden. The reader is immersed stuck in his mind, compelled to see mental processes and behaviors that appal. The strangeness of his psyche resembles a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Entering Zombie is not just reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from a gifted writer

When I was a child, I sleepwalked and later started suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the horror included a vision in which I was confined within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had ripped the slat from the window, attempting to escape. That home was decaying; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall became inundated, insect eggs fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and at one time a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in that space.

When a friend presented me with the story, I had moved out with my parents, but the tale about the home perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable to me, longing as I felt. This is a book concerning a ghostly noisy, atmospheric home and a girl who eats calcium off the rocks. I loved the story deeply and came back again and again to the story, always finding {something