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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I read this story long ago and it has lingered with me from that moment. The so-called seasonal visitors turn out to be a family from New York, who occupy the same isolated lakeside house each year. On this occasion, instead of heading back home, they opt to prolong their stay an extra month – a decision that to disturb each resident in the surrounding community. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that nobody has lingered by the water past the holiday. Regardless, the couple are determined to not leave, and that’s when events begin to grow more bizarre. The man who brings the kerosene declines to provide to them. Nobody is willing to supply supplies to the cabin, and when the Allisons attempt to drive into town, their vehicle won’t start. A storm gathers, the batteries in the radio fade, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people huddled together within their rental and waited”. What could be they anticipating? What might the residents understand? Whenever I revisit the writer’s disturbing and thought-provoking narrative, I’m reminded that the finest fright stems from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from a noted author

In this short story two people go to a typical coastal village where church bells toll constantly, a constant chiming that is bothersome and inexplicable. The opening extremely terrifying moment occurs after dark, when they choose to go for a stroll and they fail to see the sea. There’s sand, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and seawater, waves crash, but the ocean seems phantom, or another thing and worse. It’s just insanely sinister and every time I visit to the coast after dark I recall this narrative which spoiled the sea at night for me – favorably.

The recent spouses – the wife is youthful, the husband is older – go back to the hotel and find out why the bells ring, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and death-and-the-maiden meets danse macabre bedlam. It’s an unnerving contemplation on desire and deterioration, two people maturing in tandem as spouses, the bond and aggression and tenderness in matrimony.

Not just the scariest, but perhaps a top example of concise narratives in existence, and an individual preference. I read it in Spanish, in the first edition of these tales to be published locally several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I delved into this book beside the swimming area in the French countryside in 2020. Even with the bright weather I felt cold creep within me. Additionally, I sensed the electricity of excitement. I was composing my third novel, and I encountered a block. I was uncertain if there was any good way to write certain terrifying elements the book contains. Going through this book, I understood that it was possible.

Published in 1995, the novel is a bleak exploration into the thoughts of a criminal, the main character, based on a notorious figure, the serial killer who killed and mutilated 17 young men and boys in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, this person was consumed with making a zombie sex slave who would never leave by his side and carried out several macabre trials to achieve this.

The actions the book depicts are horrific, but just as scary is the psychological persuasiveness. The protagonist’s dreadful, shattered existence is plainly told with concise language, names redacted. The reader is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, obliged to witness thoughts and actions that shock. The strangeness of his mind feels like a tangible impact – or finding oneself isolated on a desolate planet. Entering this book is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I sleepwalked and later started experiencing nightmares. At one point, the fear included a vision during which I was confined in a box and, upon awakening, I found that I had removed a piece from the window, seeking to leave. That building was decaying; when storms came the downstairs hall flooded, fly larvae came down from the roof into the bedroom, and at one time a large rat climbed the drapes in the bedroom.

When a friend presented me with this author’s book, I was no longer living with my parents, but the narrative regarding the building perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable to myself, homesick at that time. This is a book concerning a ghostly noisy, emotional house and a young woman who ingests calcium from the cliffs. I adored the book deeply and returned frequently to it, consistently uncovering {something