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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson

I encountered this story some time back and it has haunted me from that moment. The titular “summer people” turn out to be the Allisons from the city, who lease the same remote country cottage every summer. On this occasion, instead of going back home, they choose to extend their stay an extra month – an action that appears to unsettle all the locals in the surrounding community. Each repeats a similar vague warning that nobody has remained by the water past Labor Day. Even so, they are resolved to remain, and that’s when things start to become stranger. The man who brings the kerosene won’t sell for them. Nobody will deliver groceries to the cottage, and when they try to travel to the community, their vehicle won’t start. A tempest builds, the power within the device diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the aged individuals crowded closely within their rental and anticipated”. What are they expecting? What might the townspeople understand? Whenever I revisit Jackson’s disturbing and thought-provoking story, I remember that the finest fright originates in the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a couple travel to a common beach community where church bells toll continuously, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and unexplainable. The opening truly frightening moment happens after dark, as they choose to take a walk and they can’t find the ocean. Sand is present, there is the odor of putrid marine life and salt, waves crash, but the ocean is a ghost, or another thing and more dreadful. It is simply profoundly ominous and whenever I travel to a beach at night I think about this story which spoiled the ocean after dark to my mind – favorably.

The newlyweds – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – go back to the inn and find out the cause of the ringing, during a prolonged scene of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and demise and innocence intersects with grim ballet bedlam. It’s an unnerving contemplation about longing and decline, two people aging together as a couple, the bond and aggression and tenderness of marriage.

Not just the most terrifying, but perhaps one of the best brief tales available, and an individual preference. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of these tales to be published in Argentina several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this narrative beside the swimming area overseas recently. Even with the bright weather I experienced cold creep through me. Additionally, I sensed the excitement of anticipation. I was working on my latest book, and I had hit a block. I wasn’t sure if there was any good way to write various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Going through this book, I saw that there was a way.

Released decades ago, the book is a dark flight through the mind of a young serial killer, Quentin P, modeled after a notorious figure, the serial killer who murdered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in the Midwest over a decade. Notoriously, the killer was fixated with creating a compliant victim that would remain him and carried out several macabre trials to do so.

The acts the story tells are horrific, but similarly terrifying is its mental realism. The character’s awful, fragmented world is directly described with concise language, details omitted. You is immersed trapped in his consciousness, compelled to see ideas and deeds that appal. The strangeness of his mind resembles a physical shock – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Starting this book is not just reading than a full body experience. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and later started experiencing nightmares. On one occasion, the fear included a dream during which I was confined inside a container and, as I roused, I found that I had ripped a part out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That building was falling apart; when storms came the entranceway flooded, fly larvae came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and at one time a big rodent ascended the window coverings in the bedroom.

After an acquaintance gave me this author’s book, I had moved out with my parents, but the narrative regarding the building located on the coastline felt familiar in my view, homesick as I was. This is a novel featuring a possessed noisy, sentimental building and a girl who eats calcium from the cliffs. I cherished the novel immensely and returned frequently to the story, each time discovering {something