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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I discovered this narrative years ago and it has lingered with me from that moment. The titular seasonal visitors happen to be a family urban dwellers, who occupy an identical off-grid country cottage every summer. On this occasion, rather than heading back to urban life, they decide to lengthen their vacation for a month longer – a decision that to unsettle each resident in the surrounding community. All pass on an identical cryptic advice that nobody has remained by the water past the end of summer. Even so, the couple insist to stay, and that is the moment events begin to get increasingly weird. The person who supplies the kerosene declines to provide to them. Not a single person is willing to supply supplies to the cottage, and at the time they try to go to the village, their vehicle fails to start. Bad weather approaches, the energy in the radio fade, and as darkness falls, “the two old people huddled together within their rental and anticipated”. What could be this couple waiting for? What could the locals understand? Whenever I read this author’s disturbing and influential narrative, I’m reminded that the finest fright comes from what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a pair journey to a common coastal village in which chimes sound continuously, a constant chiming that is irritating and unexplainable. The first very scary moment occurs at night, when they choose to take a walk and they can’t find the ocean. There’s sand, the scent exists of rotting fish and brine, surf is audible, but the sea seems phantom, or something else and even more alarming. It is simply profoundly ominous and every time I visit to the coast in the evening I remember this tale that destroyed the sea at night for me – in a good way.

The newlyweds – the woman is adolescent, the husband is older – go back to their lodging and discover the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and demise and innocence encounters grim ballet chaos. It’s an unnerving reflection on desire and decay, two bodies aging together as spouses, the bond and brutality and tenderness in matrimony.

Not only the scariest, but perhaps one of the best brief tales in existence, and an individual preference. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of this author’s works to be released in this country in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this narrative near the water in the French countryside in 2020. Even with the bright weather I felt a chill within me. I also felt the thrill of excitement. I was working on my third novel, and I encountered a wall. I wasn’t sure if it was possible an effective approach to compose various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Going through this book, I understood that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a dark flight through the mind of a murderer, the protagonist, modeled after an infamous individual, the murderer who murdered and dismembered multiple victims in a city during a specific period. Notoriously, this person was obsessed with producing a submissive individual who would never leave by his side and attempted numerous macabre trials to do so.

The actions the novel describes are terrible, but just as scary is the mental realism. Quentin P’s awful, fragmented world is simply narrated using minimal words, names redacted. You is plunged stuck in his mind, obliged to see ideas and deeds that appal. The foreignness of his mind resembles a bodily jolt – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Starting Zombie is not just reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

During my youth, I walked in my sleep and later started experiencing nightmares. At one point, the terror involved a nightmare in which I was confined within an enclosure and, as I roused, I found that I had removed a part out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That home was falling apart; when storms came the ground floor corridor became inundated, fly larvae fell from the ceiling on to my parents’ bed, and once a big rodent scaled the curtains in that space.

Once a companion presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living in my childhood residence, but the tale of the house located on the coastline felt familiar in my view, homesick as I was. It is a novel about a haunted noisy, emotional house and a girl who eats chalk from the shoreline. I adored the novel deeply and came back frequently to the story, consistently uncovering {something