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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I discovered this tale long ago and it has stayed with me since then. The so-called “summer people” are a family from New York, who lease an identical off-grid rural cabin every summer. This time, in place of returning home, they opt to extend their vacation a few more weeks – something that seems to alarm everyone in the adjacent village. Each repeats a similar vague warning that not a soul has remained in the area beyond the holiday. Even so, they are resolved to not leave, and at that point situations commence to become stranger. The individual who delivers oil won’t sell for them. No one is willing to supply groceries to their home, and as the family try to drive into town, the automobile refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the power within the device diminish, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple crowded closely inside their cabin and waited”. What could be this couple anticipating? What do the locals be aware of? Every time I read Jackson’s chilling and inspiring story, I recall that the best horror originates in that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this short story a couple journey to an ordinary seaside town in which chimes sound continuously, a constant chiming that is bothersome and unexplainable. The first truly frightening moment occurs during the evening, as they opt to take a walk and they fail to see the ocean. The beach is there, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and salt, there are waves, but the sea seems phantom, or a different entity and worse. It’s just insanely sinister and whenever I travel to a beach in the evening I remember this story which spoiled the sea at night for me – in a good way.

The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, he’s not – return to their lodging and find out why the bells ring, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and demise and innocence encounters grim ballet pandemonium. It’s an unnerving contemplation about longing and decay, two people growing old jointly as spouses, the connection and aggression and gentleness of marriage.

Not just the most frightening, but perhaps one of the best brief tales out there, and an individual preference. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of these tales to appear in Argentina several years back.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into Zombie near the water in the French countryside a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I experienced cold creep over me. I also felt the thrill of excitement. I was working on my latest book, and I encountered a wall. I was uncertain if it was possible any good way to write certain terrifying elements the story includes. Going through this book, I understood that it was possible.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a bleak exploration into the thoughts of a criminal, the protagonist, inspired by an infamous individual, the criminal who murdered and mutilated numerous individuals in Milwaukee over a decade. Notoriously, this person was obsessed with making a submissive individual who would stay him and made many grisly attempts to achieve this.

The actions the story tells are terrible, but just as scary is its own psychological persuasiveness. The protagonist’s dreadful, fragmented world is directly described using minimal words, names redacted. You is immersed trapped in his consciousness, obliged to observe mental processes and behaviors that appal. The foreignness of his thinking is like a tangible impact – or being stranded in an empty realm. Going into Zombie is less like reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

During my youth, I sleepwalked and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the terror involved a nightmare in which I was stuck within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I realized that I had ripped a piece out of the window frame, attempting to escape. That home was decaying; when storms came the entranceway became inundated, maggots came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and once a large rat climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.

When a friend handed me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living at my family home, but the tale about the home high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to myself, nostalgic at that time. This is a story featuring a possessed loud, atmospheric home and a girl who consumes chalk off the rocks. I cherished the novel so much and came back again and again to its pages, consistently uncovering {something