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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I encountered this narrative long ago and it has stayed with me since then. The named vacationers turn out to be the Allisons from New York, who lease a particular remote rural cabin each year. During this visit, in place of going back home, they decide to prolong their stay a few more weeks – something that seems to alarm each resident in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that not a soul has lingered by the water beyond the holiday. Regardless, the Allisons are resolved to remain, and that’s when things start to grow more bizarre. The person who supplies fuel refuses to sell to them. No one is willing to supply groceries to the cottage, and as they attempt to go to the village, the automobile won’t start. A tempest builds, the power of their radio diminish, and when night comes, “the elderly couple crowded closely in their summer cottage and waited”. What could be they waiting for? What could the residents be aware of? Each occasion I read this author’s chilling and thought-provoking tale, I remember that the best horror comes from that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative two people journey to a typical coastal village in which chimes sound the whole time, an incessant ringing that is annoying and unexplainable. The opening truly frightening moment occurs during the evening, at the time they opt to take a walk and they fail to see the water. There’s sand, there is the odor of putrid marine life and seawater, waves crash, but the water appears spectral, or another thing and worse. It is truly deeply malevolent and whenever I travel to the shore after dark I remember this narrative which spoiled the ocean after dark in my view – favorably.

The recent spouses – she’s very young, the man is mature – go back to the inn and discover why the bells ring, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and demise and innocence meets grim ballet pandemonium. It’s an unnerving meditation about longing and decay, a pair of individuals aging together as spouses, the bond and brutality and affection in matrimony.

Not only the most frightening, but perhaps among the finest concise narratives available, and a personal favourite. I read it en español, in the first edition of Aickman stories to be published locally in 2011.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I read this narrative by a pool in France a few years ago. Despite the sunshine I sensed cold creep through me. I also felt the excitement of excitement. I was writing my latest book, and I had hit an obstacle. I wasn’t sure if there was a proper method to craft various frightening aspects the book contains. Experiencing this novel, I realized that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a dark flight through the mind of a young serial killer, the protagonist, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who slaughtered and cut apart 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, the killer was consumed with making a zombie sex slave who would stay him and carried out several macabre trials to accomplish it.

The actions the novel describes are horrific, but similarly terrifying is the psychological persuasiveness. The character’s terrible, broken reality is plainly told with concise language, details omitted. The audience is immersed caught in his thoughts, forced to witness mental processes and behaviors that appal. The foreignness of his psyche feels like a tangible impact – or getting lost on a desolate planet. Entering this book is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by a gifted writer

In my early years, I was a somnambulist and subsequently commenced experiencing nightmares. Once, the fear involved a nightmare during which I was trapped inside a container and, upon awakening, I realized that I had removed a part from the window, trying to get out. That home was decaying; during heavy rain the downstairs hall flooded, fly larvae dropped from above into the bedroom, and on one occasion a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

After an acquaintance presented me with this author’s book, I was no longer living at my family home, but the narrative regarding the building located on the coastline appeared known in my view, nostalgic as I felt. This is a story featuring a possessed noisy, atmospheric home and a girl who eats chalk from the cliffs. I loved the book so much and returned again and again to its pages, each time discovering {something