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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from a master of suspense

I encountered this tale years ago and it has lingered with me from that moment. The named “summer people” are a family from New York, who rent a particular isolated lakeside house annually. On this occasion, rather than returning to the city, they decide to extend their vacation for a month longer – an action that appears to alarm all the locals in the nearby town. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that not a soul has ever stayed by the water past the end of summer. Regardless, they insist to stay, and at that point things start to become stranger. The individual who brings oil refuses to sell to them. Nobody is willing to supply groceries to the cottage, and at the time they try to travel to the community, the automobile fails to start. Bad weather approaches, the batteries within the device die, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals clung to each other in their summer cottage and expected”. What are they expecting? What might the residents be aware of? Each occasion I revisit this author’s disturbing and influential story, I remember that the top terror comes from that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this brief tale two people travel to a typical beach community where bells ring continuously, an incessant ringing that is annoying and unexplainable. The initial very scary moment takes place during the evening, as they decide to take a walk and they are unable to locate the ocean. Sand is present, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and salt, surf is audible, but the ocean is a ghost, or a different entity and more dreadful. It is truly deeply malevolent and every time I travel to a beach in the evening I recall this tale that ruined the sea at night to my mind – positively.

The newlyweds – the woman is adolescent, he’s not – go back to the hotel and learn why the bells ring, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and death-and-the-maiden intersects with danse macabre chaos. It is a disturbing meditation on desire and deterioration, two bodies maturing in tandem as a couple, the attachment and violence and gentleness in matrimony.

Not just the scariest, but perhaps a top example of brief tales out there, and an individual preference. I encountered it in Spanish, in the first edition of this author’s works to be published in this country in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this book beside the swimming area in France in 2020. Although it was sunny I felt cold creep over me. Additionally, I sensed the excitement of anticipation. I was writing my third novel, and I encountered a wall. I was uncertain if it was possible a proper method to craft some of the fearful things the book contains. Experiencing this novel, I understood that there was a way.

Released decades ago, the story is a grim journey within the psyche of a criminal, the main character, modeled after a notorious figure, the murderer who killed and mutilated multiple victims in a city between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, this person was fixated with creating a submissive individual that would remain by his side and made many grisly attempts to do so.

The actions the book depicts are horrific, but just as scary is its mental realism. Quentin P’s awful, shattered existence is simply narrated using minimal words, identities hidden. You is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, forced to see thoughts and actions that shock. The strangeness of his psyche is like a bodily jolt – or getting lost in an empty realm. Entering this story is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. Once, the horror featured a nightmare where I was trapped in a box and, upon awakening, I discovered that I had torn off the slat out of the window frame, attempting to escape. That building was decaying; when it rained heavily the ground floor corridor flooded, insect eggs dropped from above into the bedroom, and once a large rat ascended the window coverings in that space.

When a friend handed me this author’s book, I was residing elsewhere at my family home, but the tale about the home located on the coastline felt familiar to myself, nostalgic as I felt. It is a book concerning a ghostly clamorous, sentimental building and a girl who consumes chalk off the rocks. I cherished the story deeply and returned frequently to it, always finding {something