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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I read this narrative some time back and it has stayed with me since then. The titular vacationers happen to be the Allisons urban dwellers, who occupy a particular isolated lakeside house annually. This time, rather than going back to urban life, they choose to lengthen their stay an extra month – something that seems to unsettle each resident in the surrounding community. All pass on the same veiled caution that no one has lingered in the area after the end of summer. Regardless, they are resolved to stay, and that is the moment events begin to get increasingly weird. The person who brings fuel declines to provide to the couple. Nobody will deliver supplies to the cottage, and as the family try to drive into town, the car refuses to operate. A storm gathers, the power within the device diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people crowded closely in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What might be they expecting? What could the locals know? Whenever I peruse Jackson’s unnerving and inspiring story, I’m reminded that the finest fright comes from what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a pair travel to an ordinary coastal village where church bells toll the whole time, a constant chiming that is annoying and unexplainable. The first truly frightening scene occurs after dark, when they opt to walk around and they can’t find the water. There’s sand, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and brine, waves crash, but the sea seems phantom, or something else and even more alarming. It is truly deeply malevolent and whenever I travel to the shore in the evening I think about this tale which spoiled the ocean after dark in my view – positively.

The recent spouses – she’s very young, he’s not – return to the inn and find out the reason for the chiming, during a prolonged scene of confinement, macabre revelry and mortality and youth encounters grim ballet pandemonium. It’s a chilling meditation on desire and deterioration, two people growing old jointly as partners, the bond and brutality and tenderness in matrimony.

Not just the scariest, but likely one of the best short stories available, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of Aickman stories to be released in Argentina a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I delved into this book near the water in the French countryside a few years ago. Although it was sunny I felt a chill over me. I also experienced the excitement of anticipation. I was composing my third novel, and I faced an obstacle. I didn’t know if there was an effective approach to craft various frightening aspects the story includes. Reading Zombie, I understood that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a grim journey into the thoughts of a murderer, the main character, modeled after a notorious figure, the criminal who slaughtered and mutilated numerous individuals in a city between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, Dahmer was fixated with making a submissive individual who would stay him and carried out several macabre trials to accomplish it.

The actions the book depicts are horrific, but similarly terrifying is the mental realism. The character’s dreadful, fragmented world is simply narrated using minimal words, details omitted. The audience is immersed caught in his thoughts, forced to witness thoughts and actions that shock. The strangeness of his mind feels like a physical shock – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Starting this book is not just reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from a gifted writer

During my youth, I sleepwalked and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. Once, the fear involved a vision in which I was trapped inside a container and, as I roused, I realized that I had removed a part off the window, attempting to escape. That house was crumbling; when storms came the ground floor corridor filled with water, maggots came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and at one time a big rodent scaled the curtains in my sister’s room.

After an acquaintance gave me this author’s book, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the tale regarding the building located on the coastline felt familiar to myself, longing at that time. This is a novel about a haunted clamorous, atmospheric home and a female character who eats calcium off the rocks. I cherished the novel deeply and went back repeatedly to the story, each time discovering {something