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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I read this story long ago and it has stayed with me ever since. The so-called “summer people” happen to be a couple from the city, who lease a particular off-grid country cottage each year. On this occasion, in place of going back to urban life, they choose to lengthen their holiday a few more weeks – a decision that to disturb each resident in the nearby town. Each repeats an identical cryptic advice that no one has lingered in the area beyond the holiday. Nonetheless, they are determined to remain, and that is the moment events begin to grow more bizarre. The person who supplies fuel declines to provide to them. Not a single person agrees to bring supplies to the cabin, and at the time the Allisons endeavor to travel to the community, the car won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the power within the device fade, and with the arrival of dusk, “the aged individuals huddled together inside their cabin and waited”. What might be this couple anticipating? What might the locals know? Every time I peruse this author’s chilling and influential tale, I’m reminded that the top terror stems from that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a couple journey to a common beach community in which chimes sound the whole time, a constant chiming that is irritating and unexplainable. The opening extremely terrifying episode takes place during the evening, at the time they choose to walk around and they can’t find the ocean. There’s sand, there is the odor of decaying seafood and seawater, there are waves, but the sea seems phantom, or another thing and even more alarming. It’s just profoundly ominous and each occasion I travel to the coast at night I recall this tale that destroyed the sea at night for me – positively.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, he’s not – return to their lodging and discover the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and mortality and youth encounters dance of death pandemonium. It is a disturbing contemplation on desire and deterioration, two bodies growing old jointly as partners, the bond and violence and gentleness in matrimony.

Not merely the most frightening, but probably among the finest short stories available, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in Spanish, in the debut release of this author’s works to appear in this country in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from an esteemed writer

I read Zombie beside the swimming area in France in 2020. Despite the sunshine I experienced cold creep within me. I also felt the electricity of anticipation. I was working on a new project, and I faced an obstacle. I was uncertain if there was any good way to compose some of the fearful things the book contains. Reading Zombie, I realized that there was a way.

Published in 1995, the story is a dark flight within the psyche of a young serial killer, the main character, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who slaughtered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in a city over a decade. Infamously, this person was obsessed with making a submissive individual that would remain him and carried out several grisly attempts to accomplish it.

The deeds the novel describes are terrible, but equally frightening is the psychological persuasiveness. The protagonist’s dreadful, shattered existence is simply narrated with concise language, names redacted. The audience is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, compelled to observe thoughts and actions that appal. The strangeness of his psyche feels like a tangible impact – or getting lost in an empty realm. Going into this story feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I sleepwalked and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the fear included a dream in which I was trapped inside a container and, as I roused, I found that I had torn off a piece from the window, seeking to leave. That building was crumbling; when storms came the downstairs hall became inundated, insect eggs came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a big rodent climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.

After an acquaintance handed me the story, I had moved out with my parents, but the tale about the home high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to myself, homesick as I was. It’s a book about a haunted loud, sentimental building and a young woman who consumes calcium from the cliffs. I loved the book so much and returned again and again to the story, consistently uncovering {something