🔗 Share this article

Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I discovered this tale long ago and it has lingered with me since then. The so-called seasonal visitors happen to be the Allisons urban dwellers, who lease a particular isolated country cottage each year. On this occasion, rather than returning to the city, they opt to extend their stay an extra month – something that seems to alarm everyone in the nearby town. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that not a soul has ever stayed by the water beyond the holiday. Even so, the couple insist to remain, and that is the moment events begin to become stranger. The person who brings oil won’t sell for them. Not a single person will deliver groceries to the cabin, and when they endeavor to drive into town, the automobile fails to start. A tempest builds, the batteries of their radio fade, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people huddled together inside their cabin and anticipated”. What could be the Allisons expecting? What might the townspeople know? Every time I peruse Jackson’s chilling and influential story, I recall that the top terror originates in what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a couple journey to a typical coastal village where bells ring continuously, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and inexplicable. The first very scary moment takes place during the evening, when they choose to go for a stroll and they can’t find the sea. There’s sand, there is the odor of putrid marine life and salt, waves crash, but the sea seems phantom, or a different entity and more dreadful. It is truly insanely sinister and whenever I travel to the shore after dark I remember this tale that ruined the sea at night in my view – in a good way.

The young couple – the woman is adolescent, the husband is older – head back to their lodging and discover why the bells ring, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and death-and-the-maiden meets grim ballet chaos. It’s an unnerving reflection about longing and decline, a pair of individuals maturing in tandem as partners, the connection and violence and gentleness within wedlock.

Not merely the most terrifying, but perhaps one of the best brief tales out there, and an individual preference. I read it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of this author’s works to be released in this country several years back.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I perused Zombie near the water in France recently. Even with the bright weather I experienced cold creep within me. I also felt the thrill of fascination. I was working on my latest book, and I faced a wall. I was uncertain whether there existed an effective approach to craft certain terrifying elements the story includes. Reading Zombie, I saw that it could be done.

Released decades ago, the story is a dark flight within the psyche of a murderer, the protagonist, modeled after a notorious figure, the serial killer who murdered and cut apart multiple victims in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, the killer was obsessed with producing a submissive individual that would remain him and attempted numerous grisly attempts to do so.

The acts the novel describes are appalling, but equally frightening is its emotional authenticity. Quentin P’s dreadful, broken reality is plainly told with concise language, details omitted. The reader is sunk deep stuck in his mind, forced to see mental processes and behaviors that appal. The alien nature of his thinking resembles a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Starting this story is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I walked in my sleep and subsequently commenced having night terrors. Once, the horror included a nightmare in which I was trapped within an enclosure and, as I roused, I realized that I had removed a part out of the window frame, trying to get out. That building was falling apart; when it rained heavily the ground floor corridor flooded, insect eggs dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a large rat scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

Once a companion gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out with my parents, but the tale regarding the building located on the coastline felt familiar to myself, longing as I felt. It is a story about a haunted noisy, sentimental building and a girl who consumes calcium from the cliffs. I loved the book so much and came back again and again to the story, consistently uncovering {something