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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I encountered this story years ago and it has lingered with me ever since. The named seasonal visitors turn out to be the Allisons urban dwellers, who rent an identical isolated rural cabin each year. During this visit, in place of returning to urban life, they choose to lengthen their holiday a few more weeks – something that seems to disturb all the locals in the nearby town. All pass on a similar vague warning that no one has ever stayed in the area after the holiday. Even so, they insist to stay, and at that point events begin to become stranger. The individual who brings the kerosene won’t sell to the couple. Nobody will deliver groceries to the cabin, and as the family attempt to drive into town, the car won’t start. A storm gathers, the power of their radio diminish, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals clung to each other within their rental and waited”. What are the Allisons anticipating? What might the townspeople understand? Every time I revisit the writer’s unnerving and influential story, I’m reminded that the top terror originates in the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a pair journey to a common seaside town where church bells toll the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is irritating and unexplainable. The initial very scary episode happens after dark, at the time they opt to go for a stroll and they fail to see the sea. The beach is there, the scent exists of putrid marine life and salt, waves crash, but the sea appears spectral, or another thing and more dreadful. It is simply profoundly ominous and whenever I go to a beach in the evening I recall this story that destroyed the ocean after dark for me – favorably.

The newlyweds – she’s very young, the husband is older – go back to the inn and discover the reason for the chiming, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden intersects with danse macabre bedlam. It is a disturbing contemplation regarding craving and deterioration, two bodies maturing in tandem as partners, the attachment and aggression and affection within wedlock.

Not just the most terrifying, but probably among the finest short stories in existence, and a beloved choice. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of these tales to be published locally several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this book near the water overseas in 2020. Even with the bright weather I sensed an icy feeling through me. I also experienced the electricity of excitement. I was writing my latest book, and I encountered a block. I didn’t know if it was possible any good way to compose some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I saw that it was possible.

Published in 1995, the book is a dark flight into the thoughts of a criminal, the protagonist, based on an infamous individual, the criminal who killed and mutilated 17 young men and boys in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, Dahmer was consumed with making a zombie sex slave who would never leave by his side and carried out several grisly attempts to do so.

The actions the story tells are appalling, but just as scary is its own psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s dreadful, shattered existence is directly described with concise language, names redacted. You is immersed trapped in his consciousness, obliged to observe thoughts and actions that horrify. The alien nature of his thinking is like a physical shock – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Starting Zombie is less like reading than a full body experience. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and eventually began having night terrors. At one point, the fear included a dream where I was stuck inside a container and, upon awakening, I realized that I had torn off the slat off the window, trying to get out. That building was decaying; when storms came the ground floor corridor flooded, maggots dropped from above onto the bed, and at one time a large rat scaled the curtains in that space.

When a friend gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out in my childhood residence, but the story about the home perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable in my view, homesick as I felt. It’s a novel concerning a ghostly loud, sentimental building and a young woman who consumes calcium from the shoreline. I cherished the novel deeply and came back again and again to the story, each time discovering {something