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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I discovered this story long ago and it has haunted me from that moment. The named “summer people” are a couple urban dwellers, who lease an identical remote rural cabin annually. During this visit, in place of returning to urban life, they choose to extend their stay an extra month – a decision that to unsettle each resident in the surrounding community. Each repeats the same veiled caution that nobody has lingered by the water past the holiday. Even so, they are resolved to stay, and that is the moment things start to become stranger. The person who supplies oil refuses to sell to the couple. Nobody agrees to bring groceries to the cottage, and as the Allisons try to drive into town, the automobile won’t start. A storm gathers, the energy within the device fade, and when night comes, “the aged individuals crowded closely inside their cabin and expected”. What are this couple expecting? What could the locals know? Whenever I peruse Jackson’s disturbing and influential tale, I recall that the finest fright comes from the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes from a noted author

In this short story a couple travel to a common coastal village where bells ring constantly, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and unexplainable. The first truly frightening episode happens after dark, when they decide to take a walk and they can’t find the sea. Sand is present, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and seawater, waves crash, but the ocean appears spectral, or a different entity and even more alarming. It is simply insanely sinister and every time I travel to the shore at night I remember this story which spoiled the ocean after dark for me – in a good way.

The recent spouses – she’s very young, he’s not – go back to the hotel and discover why the bells ring, in a long sequence of confinement, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth encounters dance of death bedlam. It’s an unnerving reflection about longing and deterioration, two bodies maturing in tandem as a couple, the attachment and aggression and tenderness within wedlock.

Not merely the most frightening, but likely among the finest short stories available, and an individual preference. I experienced it en español, in the initial publication of these tales to be published locally a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I read this book beside the swimming area in the French countryside recently. Even with the bright weather I sensed an icy feeling over me. I also felt the electricity of excitement. I was working on a new project, and I faced a block. I wasn’t sure if there was any good way to compose some of the fearful things the book contains. Going through this book, I realized that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a bleak exploration into the thoughts of a criminal, the protagonist, based on an infamous individual, the serial killer who killed and dismembered multiple victims in a city over a decade. As is well-known, the killer was obsessed with making a zombie sex slave that would remain by his side and made many horrific efforts to accomplish it.

The acts the book depicts are appalling, but just as scary is its emotional authenticity. The character’s awful, fragmented world is plainly told using minimal words, identities hidden. The audience is plunged trapped in his consciousness, obliged to witness ideas and deeds that horrify. The foreignness of his mind is like a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Going into this book is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I sleepwalked and later started experiencing nightmares. Once, the terror involved a vision where I was confined inside a container and, when I woke up, I found that I had ripped the slat from the window, trying to get out. That building was falling apart; when it rained heavily the ground floor corridor filled with water, fly larvae fell from the ceiling onto the bed, and at one time a big rodent climbed the drapes in that space.

When a friend handed me the story, I had moved out at my family home, but the tale about the home high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable in my view, homesick at that time. It’s a novel featuring a possessed clamorous, sentimental building and a young woman who eats limestone off the rocks. I adored the story deeply and returned repeatedly to it, each time discovering {something