🔗 Share this article

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson

I read this story years ago and it has stayed with me ever since. The named “summer people” are a couple urban dwellers, who occupy a particular off-grid rural cabin each year. During this visit, in place of going back home, they choose to lengthen their holiday an extra month – an action that appears to unsettle all the locals in the nearby town. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that no one has remained in the area past Labor Day. Regardless, the Allisons are determined to not leave, and at that point events begin to grow more bizarre. The man who supplies oil declines to provide to the couple. Nobody agrees to bring supplies to the cabin, and at the time they endeavor to drive into town, the automobile fails to start. A storm gathers, the power within the device diminish, and when night comes, “the two old people crowded closely within their rental and anticipated”. What are the Allisons waiting for? What might the residents know? Every time I revisit this author’s disturbing and influential story, I recall that the finest fright stems from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from a noted author

In this concise narrative a pair journey to an ordinary seaside town in which chimes sound constantly, an incessant ringing that is irritating and unexplainable. The first extremely terrifying episode occurs after dark, at the time they decide to walk around and they can’t find the water. Sand is present, there’s the smell of rotting fish and seawater, there are waves, but the sea appears spectral, or something else and more dreadful. It’s just deeply malevolent and every time I travel to a beach in the evening I think about this tale which spoiled the ocean after dark for me – favorably.

The newlyweds – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – head back to the hotel and learn the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of confinement, gruesome festivities and death-and-the-maiden encounters dance of death pandemonium. It is a disturbing contemplation about longing and decline, two bodies aging together as a couple, the connection and brutality and tenderness within wedlock.

Not just the scariest, but probably among the finest concise narratives out there, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in Spanish, in the initial publication of this author’s works to appear in this country in 2011.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer

I read this book beside the swimming area in the French countryside a few years ago. Despite the sunshine I sensed cold creep through me. I also experienced the thrill of fascination. I was composing a new project, and I faced an obstacle. I wasn’t sure whether there existed a proper method to compose certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Experiencing this novel, I understood that it could be done.

Released decades ago, the story is a bleak exploration within the psyche of a murderer, Quentin P, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who killed and cut apart 17 young men and boys in the Midwest during a specific period. Infamously, the killer was obsessed with producing a submissive individual who would never leave him and made many horrific efforts to achieve this.

The actions the novel describes are horrific, but equally frightening is its own emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s awful, shattered existence is plainly told using minimal words, identities hidden. The reader is immersed trapped in his consciousness, forced to observe mental processes and behaviors that shock. The strangeness of his thinking is like a tangible impact – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Starting Zombie is less like reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced suffering from bad dreams. Once, the horror featured a nightmare where I was stuck inside a container and, upon awakening, I found that I had removed a part out of the window frame, trying to get out. That home was crumbling; when storms came the downstairs hall filled with water, insect eggs dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and once a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in the bedroom.

After an acquaintance gave me the story, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the tale of the house perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable to myself, longing as I was. This is a novel about a haunted noisy, atmospheric home and a young woman who ingests calcium from the shoreline. I adored the story deeply and came back repeatedly to it, each time discovering {something