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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense

I encountered this narrative long ago and it has lingered with me from that moment. The named seasonal visitors happen to be a couple from New York, who rent an identical off-grid country cottage annually. During this visit, instead of returning home, they decide to extend their vacation for a month longer – a decision that to disturb each resident in the surrounding community. All pass on the same veiled caution that nobody has ever stayed by the water beyond Labor Day. Regardless, the couple are resolved to stay, and at that point things start to grow more bizarre. The man who brings fuel won’t sell for them. No one will deliver supplies to the cottage, and at the time the Allisons endeavor to drive into town, the automobile refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the power of their radio fade, and with the arrival of dusk, “the aged individuals crowded closely inside their cabin and expected”. What could be the Allisons waiting for? What could the townspeople understand? Whenever I peruse Jackson’s disturbing and influential tale, I remember that the best horror stems from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from a noted author

In this brief tale a couple travel to a common beach community where church bells toll constantly, a constant chiming that is bothersome and unexplainable. The initial extremely terrifying scene happens after dark, when they choose to go for a stroll and they can’t find the ocean. The beach is there, the scent exists of rotting fish and brine, waves crash, but the water is a ghost, or a different entity and even more alarming. It is simply insanely sinister and every time I visit to a beach at night I recall this tale that ruined the beach in the evening in my view – favorably.

The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – go back to the inn and learn the reason for the chiming, during a prolonged scene of confinement, necro-orgy and death-and-the-maiden encounters danse macabre pandemonium. It’s a chilling meditation on desire and deterioration, two people growing old jointly as a couple, the attachment and brutality and gentleness within wedlock.

Not just the most frightening, but likely among the finest short stories in existence, and a beloved choice. I read it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of this author’s works to be published locally several years back.

Catriona Ward

Zombie from an esteemed writer

I perused this narrative by a pool in France recently. Despite the sunshine I experienced an icy feeling within me. I also felt the excitement of anticipation. I was writing a new project, and I had hit a wall. I was uncertain whether there existed a proper method to write some of the fearful things the book contains. Experiencing this novel, I saw that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the story is a bleak exploration within the psyche of a young serial killer, the main character, modeled after a notorious figure, the serial killer who murdered and dismembered numerous individuals in a city during a specific period. Infamously, Dahmer was obsessed with making a zombie sex slave that would remain by his side and made many macabre trials to achieve this.

The acts the book depicts are terrible, but just as scary is its emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s dreadful, fragmented world is directly described using minimal words, identities hidden. The audience is immersed caught in his thoughts, obliged to witness ideas and deeds that horrify. The alien nature of his psyche resembles a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Going into this story is less like reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced having night terrors. On one occasion, the horror involved a vision where I was trapped inside a container and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had removed the slat from the window, trying to get out. That home was falling apart; during heavy rain the entranceway filled with water, fly larvae dropped from above into the bedroom, and at one time a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in that space.

When a friend presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living at my family home, but the tale regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to myself, longing at that time. It’s a book featuring a possessed noisy, emotional house and a young woman who ingests calcium from the shoreline. I adored the book so much and returned again and again to it, consistently uncovering {something