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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I encountered this narrative some time back and it has stayed with me ever since. The named seasonal visitors happen to be a family urban dwellers, who lease an identical isolated country cottage annually. This time, in place of going back to urban life, they decide to extend their stay a few more weeks – a decision that to alarm all the locals in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that not a soul has ever stayed at the lake beyond Labor Day. Regardless, the couple are resolved to not leave, and at that point situations commence to get increasingly weird. The individual who supplies oil refuses to sell for them. No one agrees to bring groceries to the cabin, and as the family endeavor to drive into town, their vehicle won’t start. A storm gathers, the batteries of their radio fade, and as darkness falls, “the two old people huddled together inside their cabin and expected”. What are the Allisons anticipating? What could the residents know? Whenever I read the writer’s unnerving and inspiring story, I’m reminded that the best horror stems from the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes from a noted author

In this short story two people travel to an ordinary beach community in which chimes sound the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and inexplicable. The opening very scary moment takes place at night, as they opt to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the sea. Sand is present, the scent exists of rotting fish and salt, there are waves, but the water seems phantom, or a different entity and more dreadful. It’s just profoundly ominous and whenever I visit to the coast after dark I remember this story that destroyed the sea at night for me – favorably.

The newlyweds – she’s very young, he’s not – return to their lodging and learn the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of confinement, necro-orgy and demise and innocence encounters grim ballet pandemonium. It’s an unnerving meditation on desire and decay, two people growing old jointly as a couple, the connection and aggression and affection of marriage.

Not only the most frightening, but probably a top example of concise narratives in existence, and a beloved choice. I read it en español, in the debut release of these tales to be published in this country several years back.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I read Zombie by a pool overseas recently. Even with the bright weather I sensed cold creep within me. I also experienced the thrill of excitement. I was writing my latest book, and I encountered an obstacle. I didn’t know if it was possible an effective approach to compose some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I realized that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a bleak exploration within the psyche of a murderer, the main character, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who slaughtered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in the Midwest over a decade. As is well-known, Dahmer was consumed with creating a submissive individual who would stay by his side and made many grisly attempts to achieve this.

The acts the novel describes are appalling, but just as scary is the emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s awful, shattered existence is directly described with concise language, names redacted. The reader is sunk deep stuck in his mind, forced to see thoughts and actions that horrify. The foreignness of his mind feels like a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Entering Zombie feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from a gifted writer

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and later started experiencing nightmares. On one occasion, the terror involved a dream during which I was confined within an enclosure and, upon awakening, I realized that I had removed the slat off the window, trying to get out. That building was crumbling; when it rained heavily the ground floor corridor became inundated, fly larvae came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and at one time a big rodent climbed the drapes in the bedroom.

When a friend presented me with this author’s book, I was no longer living in my childhood residence, but the tale of the house located on the coastline appeared known to myself, homesick as I felt. This is a novel concerning a ghostly noisy, emotional house and a young woman who eats limestone off the rocks. I loved the story so much and came back again and again to the story, always finding {something