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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I read this tale some time back and it has lingered with me ever since. The so-called seasonal visitors are a family urban dwellers, who rent a particular off-grid country cottage annually. During this visit, instead of returning to urban life, they choose to prolong their holiday a few more weeks – something that seems to unsettle each resident in the surrounding community. Everyone conveys the same veiled caution that nobody has lingered in the area past the end of summer. Regardless, they are resolved to not leave, and at that point situations commence to get increasingly weird. The person who delivers the kerosene refuses to sell to them. Not a single person will deliver food to the cottage, and when the Allisons endeavor to travel to the community, the car won’t start. A tempest builds, the batteries of their radio diminish, and when night comes, “the elderly couple crowded closely within their rental and expected”. What are this couple waiting for? What could the townspeople know? Each occasion I read this author’s unnerving and inspiring tale, I recall that the finest fright comes from what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes from a noted author

In this short story two people journey to a typical seaside town in which chimes sound the whole time, a constant chiming that is bothersome and unexplainable. The first truly frightening moment occurs during the evening, as they decide to walk around and they are unable to locate the water. There’s sand, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and salt, waves crash, but the water seems phantom, or a different entity and worse. It’s just insanely sinister and each occasion I go to the shore in the evening I think about this tale that ruined the beach in the evening to my mind – in a good way.

The newlyweds – she’s very young, the man is mature – go back to their lodging and learn the reason for the chiming, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and death-and-the-maiden meets dance of death pandemonium. It’s a chilling contemplation on desire and decay, two people maturing in tandem as partners, the attachment and brutality and affection within wedlock.

Not just the most frightening, but perhaps one of the best brief tales in existence, and an individual preference. I experienced it en español, in the initial publication of this author’s works to be published in Argentina a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer

I delved into this book beside the swimming area in France a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I felt a chill over me. Additionally, I sensed the excitement of anticipation. I was writing my third novel, and I faced an obstacle. I didn’t know if there was an effective approach to write certain terrifying elements the book contains. Reading Zombie, I understood that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the novel is a bleak exploration within the psyche of a murderer, the protagonist, modeled after an infamous individual, the murderer who killed and dismembered 17 young men and boys in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, Dahmer was fixated with creating a submissive individual who would stay by his side and made many macabre trials to do so.

The deeds the book depicts are horrific, but similarly terrifying is its psychological persuasiveness. The character’s awful, fragmented world is directly described in spare prose, names redacted. You is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, forced to witness mental processes and behaviors that appal. The strangeness of his mind is like a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Entering this story feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the horror included a vision where I was confined within an enclosure and, upon awakening, I found that I had torn off a piece from the window, attempting to escape. That home was falling apart; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall flooded, insect eggs dropped from above onto the bed, and at one time a large rat climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.

When a friend presented me with this author’s book, I was no longer living in my childhood residence, but the story about the home perched on the cliffs felt familiar to myself, longing at that time. It is a novel featuring a possessed clamorous, atmospheric home and a female character who eats limestone from the cliffs. I loved the novel immensely and came back repeatedly to the story, consistently uncovering {something