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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I encountered this narrative years ago and it has stayed with me from that moment. The titular “summer people” happen to be the Allisons urban dwellers, who lease an identical off-grid country cottage every summer. During this visit, instead of going back to urban life, they choose to prolong their holiday an extra month – something that seems to unsettle everyone in the surrounding community. All pass on the same veiled caution that not a soul has ever stayed in the area beyond the holiday. Nonetheless, they insist to remain, and at that point events begin to grow more bizarre. The person who brings the kerosene declines to provide for them. Not a single person is willing to supply food to their home, and at the time the family attempt to travel to the community, the automobile refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the energy of their radio fade, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals huddled together inside their cabin and expected”. What could be the Allisons anticipating? What might the locals understand? Each occasion I peruse the writer’s disturbing and influential story, I’m reminded that the finest fright comes from that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by a noted author

In this concise narrative a couple journey to a common seaside town where church bells toll continuously, a constant chiming that is bothersome and puzzling. The opening truly frightening moment takes place after dark, as they decide to go for a stroll and they can’t find the ocean. Sand is present, the scent exists of putrid marine life and brine, surf is audible, but the sea is a ghost, or something else and even more alarming. It’s just insanely sinister and whenever I visit to the shore in the evening I recall this narrative that destroyed the beach in the evening for me – in a good way.

The newlyweds – the woman is adolescent, he’s not – head back to the inn and find out the cause of the ringing, during a prolonged scene of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and mortality and youth encounters dance of death pandemonium. It is a disturbing meditation regarding craving and decay, two bodies aging together as a couple, the connection and aggression and gentleness within wedlock.

Not just the most terrifying, but likely a top example of concise narratives out there, and an individual preference. I read it en español, in the first edition of Aickman stories to be published locally several years back.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this narrative beside the swimming area in France recently. Despite the sunshine I felt an icy feeling within me. I also felt the electricity of excitement. I was writing a new project, and I had hit a block. I didn’t know if there was any good way to write various frightening aspects the book contains. Reading Zombie, I saw that there was a way.

Published in 1995, the novel is a dark flight within the psyche of a young serial killer, Quentin P, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who murdered and mutilated 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, the killer was consumed with making a compliant victim who would stay him and made many grisly attempts to accomplish it.

The actions the book depicts are terrible, but equally frightening is its own emotional authenticity. The character’s terrible, broken reality is plainly told in spare prose, names redacted. The audience is immersed caught in his thoughts, compelled to see thoughts and actions that appal. The alien nature of his mind resembles a physical shock – or getting lost on a desolate planet. Going into this book feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from a gifted writer

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and later started having night terrors. Once, the terror involved a nightmare in which I was stuck within an enclosure and, upon awakening, I discovered that I had removed a part out of the window frame, attempting to escape. That building was crumbling; when it rained heavily the entranceway flooded, maggots dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and at one time a big rodent climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.

Once a companion presented me with this author’s book, I had moved out in my childhood residence, but the narrative about the home perched on the cliffs felt familiar to myself, homesick as I was. It is a book concerning a ghostly loud, sentimental building and a young woman who consumes calcium from the cliffs. I loved the novel immensely and came back again and again to its pages, each time discovering {something