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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I discovered this story some time back and it has haunted me from that moment. The named “summer people” are a family from New York, who rent the same remote country cottage annually. On this occasion, instead of returning to the city, they choose to prolong their vacation an extra month – an action that appears to unsettle everyone in the surrounding community. All pass on the same veiled caution that nobody has ever stayed at the lake after the end of summer. Nonetheless, they are determined to not leave, and at that point events begin to grow more bizarre. The individual who brings oil declines to provide to the couple. Nobody will deliver food to the cottage, and at the time the family try to travel to the community, their vehicle refuses to operate. A storm gathers, the power in the radio fade, and with the arrival of dusk, “the aged individuals crowded closely inside their cabin and expected”. What are they waiting for? What do the townspeople know? Every time I revisit this author’s chilling and influential tale, I remember that the finest fright stems from the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a pair go to a common coastal village where church bells toll continuously, a constant chiming that is annoying and puzzling. The initial very scary scene happens after dark, as they decide to go for a stroll and they fail to see the water. The beach is there, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and salt, there are waves, but the sea is a ghost, or a different entity and even more alarming. It is truly deeply malevolent and each occasion I visit to the coast in the evening I think about this tale that ruined the beach in the evening in my view – positively.

The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – return to their lodging and learn why the bells ring, through an extended episode of confinement, gruesome festivities and death-and-the-maiden meets dance of death chaos. It’s a chilling meditation regarding craving and decay, two people maturing in tandem as spouses, the attachment and violence and tenderness within wedlock.

Not merely the most frightening, but perhaps a top example of short stories in existence, and a beloved choice. I read it in Spanish, in the initial publication of these tales to be published in this country several years back.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer

I delved into this narrative near the water overseas in 2020. Despite the sunshine I experienced an icy feeling over me. I also felt the electricity of fascination. I was writing a new project, and I encountered an obstacle. I was uncertain if it was possible any good way to write some of the fearful things the story includes. Going through this book, I understood that it could be done.

Released decades ago, the novel is a dark flight through the mind of a young serial killer, Quentin P, inspired by a notorious figure, the murderer who slaughtered and cut apart multiple victims in a city between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, this person was obsessed with making a compliant victim that would remain by his side and attempted numerous grisly attempts to accomplish it.

The actions the story tells are appalling, but just as scary is its own mental realism. The character’s dreadful, broken reality is directly described with concise language, details omitted. The reader is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, forced to observe ideas and deeds that shock. The alien nature of his thinking resembles a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated on a desolate planet. Going into this book feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and later started having night terrors. On one occasion, the fear featured a vision during which I was trapped within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had removed a piece off the window, attempting to escape. That building was decaying; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall filled with water, maggots dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and at one time a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in that space.

Once a companion handed me this author’s book, I was no longer living in my childhood residence, but the tale regarding the building perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable to myself, nostalgic as I was. This is a book about a haunted loud, atmospheric home and a female character who ingests limestone off the rocks. I adored the novel immensely and came back frequently to its pages, consistently uncovering {something