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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I read this tale some time back and it has lingered with me ever since. The named “summer people” happen to be the Allisons urban dwellers, who lease an identical remote country cottage every summer. This time, in place of going back to urban life, they choose to prolong their holiday an extra month – something that seems to unsettle all the locals in the nearby town. Each repeats a similar vague warning that no one has ever stayed at the lake after the end of summer. Regardless, the Allisons insist to remain, and that is the moment events begin to get increasingly weird. The person who supplies the kerosene declines to provide to them. No one agrees to bring supplies to the cottage, and when the family try to go to the village, their vehicle won’t start. A tempest builds, the batteries of their radio die, and when night comes, “the elderly couple crowded closely inside their cabin and expected”. What could be they anticipating? What do the residents know? Each occasion I read this author’s unnerving and influential narrative, I recall that the finest fright stems from what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes by a noted author

In this short story a pair go to an ordinary seaside town where bells ring the whole time, an incessant ringing that is annoying and inexplicable. The initial very scary moment happens during the evening, when they opt to go for a stroll and they fail to see the sea. Sand is present, there is the odor of decaying seafood and brine, there are waves, but the water is a ghost, or something else and worse. It is simply profoundly ominous and whenever I go to the coast after dark I think about this tale which spoiled the beach in the evening to my mind – in a good way.

The recent spouses – she’s very young, the man is mature – return to their lodging and discover the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and mortality and youth meets dance of death bedlam. It’s a chilling contemplation on desire and decline, a pair of individuals maturing in tandem as a couple, the bond and aggression and affection in matrimony.

Not only the scariest, but perhaps one of the best concise narratives available, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of Aickman stories to be published in Argentina several years back.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I delved into this narrative beside the swimming area overseas a few years ago. Although it was sunny I sensed cold creep over me. I also felt the electricity of anticipation. I was composing a new project, and I faced a block. I wasn’t sure whether there existed a proper method to write some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Going through this book, I saw that there was a way.

Released decades ago, the story is a dark flight within the psyche of a young serial killer, the protagonist, inspired by an infamous individual, the murderer who slaughtered and mutilated numerous individuals in a city over a decade. Notoriously, Dahmer was fixated with making a compliant victim who would stay by his side and carried out several grisly attempts to do so.

The actions the story tells are horrific, but similarly terrifying is its own mental realism. Quentin P’s terrible, shattered existence is directly described with concise language, names redacted. You is plunged trapped in his consciousness, obliged to see thoughts and actions that shock. The strangeness of his mind resembles a physical shock – or getting lost on a desolate planet. Going into this book is less like reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and subsequently commenced having night terrors. On one occasion, the horror involved a nightmare during which I was stuck within an enclosure and, as I roused, I discovered that I had torn off a piece from the window, trying to get out. That building was falling apart; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall flooded, fly larvae dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and once a large rat scaled the curtains in my sister’s room.

Once a companion handed me the story, I was residing elsewhere at my family home, but the tale regarding the building located on the coastline felt familiar to me, homesick as I felt. It’s a book concerning a ghostly clamorous, sentimental building and a young woman who eats chalk from the cliffs. I cherished the book deeply and returned again and again to it, consistently uncovering {something