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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from a master of suspense

I read this story years ago and it has haunted me since then. The so-called “summer people” happen to be a family from the city, who rent the same remote lakeside house every summer. This time, rather than going back to the city, they decide to prolong their vacation for a month longer – something that seems to unsettle each resident in the surrounding community. Each repeats an identical cryptic advice that not a soul has lingered in the area after Labor Day. Nonetheless, they are resolved to stay, and that’s when things start to become stranger. The person who delivers the kerosene won’t sell for them. Not a single person is willing to supply supplies to the cottage, and when the family try to travel to the community, the car fails to start. A tempest builds, the power in the radio die, and when night comes, “the elderly couple crowded closely inside their cabin and anticipated”. What might be they expecting? What do the locals be aware of? Whenever I read this author’s unnerving and thought-provoking narrative, I recall that the best horror originates in the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this brief tale two people go to a common beach community where church bells toll continuously, a constant chiming that is irritating and inexplicable. The opening truly frightening episode takes place after dark, when they choose to go for a stroll and they can’t find the sea. Sand is present, there is the odor of putrid marine life and salt, surf is audible, but the ocean appears spectral, or a different entity and more dreadful. It is simply deeply malevolent and each occasion I visit to the shore at night I think about this narrative which spoiled the beach in the evening to my mind – in a good way.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, he’s not – return to their lodging and learn the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of confinement, gruesome festivities and death-and-the-maiden encounters dance of death pandemonium. It’s a chilling contemplation about longing and decline, two bodies growing old jointly as a couple, the connection and aggression and tenderness in matrimony.

Not just the most terrifying, but probably a top example of brief tales out there, and an individual preference. I read it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of this author’s works to be released in Argentina a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I delved into Zombie by a pool in France recently. Even with the bright weather I felt a chill over me. Additionally, I sensed the electricity of fascination. I was writing my latest book, and I had hit a block. I didn’t know if it was possible any good way to write some of the fearful things the book contains. Reading Zombie, I saw that there was a way.

Published in 1995, the story is a dark flight into the thoughts of a criminal, the main character, based on a notorious figure, the criminal who slaughtered and cut apart multiple victims in the Midwest during a specific period. Infamously, Dahmer was fixated with making a compliant victim that would remain by his side and carried out several horrific efforts to accomplish it.

The deeds the story tells are horrific, but similarly terrifying is its own mental realism. The character’s awful, fragmented world is simply narrated with concise language, names redacted. The reader is immersed trapped in his consciousness, obliged to see mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The strangeness of his psyche is like a physical shock – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Entering this book feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I was a somnambulist and subsequently commenced suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the terror featured a nightmare during which I was trapped inside a container and, when I woke up, I found that I had torn off a piece out of the window frame, attempting to escape. That building was falling apart; when it rained heavily the entranceway filled with water, fly larvae fell from the ceiling on to my parents’ bed, and once a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in that space.

When a friend handed me the story, I was residing elsewhere in my childhood residence, but the tale about the home high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to myself, longing at that time. It is a book about a haunted noisy, atmospheric home and a female character who eats limestone off the rocks. I loved the book deeply and returned frequently to its pages, each time discovering {something