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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I read this tale long ago and it has lingered with me since then. The titular vacationers turn out to be a family from New York, who occupy a particular isolated country cottage annually. During this visit, rather than returning home, they decide to prolong their holiday a few more weeks – a decision that to unsettle each resident in the nearby town. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that no one has ever stayed at the lake after the end of summer. Nonetheless, they are determined to remain, and at that point situations commence to become stranger. The man who supplies oil won’t sell to the couple. Not a single person agrees to bring supplies to their home, and when the family try to drive into town, their vehicle won’t start. A storm gathers, the energy of their radio diminish, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals crowded closely in their summer cottage and waited”. What are they anticipating? What might the townspeople be aware of? Each occasion I peruse Jackson’s disturbing and thought-provoking tale, I’m reminded that the finest fright comes from the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by a noted author

In this short story a pair travel to a common beach community where church bells toll continuously, a perpetual pealing that is irritating and puzzling. The first extremely terrifying moment occurs after dark, at the time they opt to take a walk and they fail to see the sea. There’s sand, the scent exists of rotting fish and seawater, surf is audible, but the ocean is a ghost, or something else and worse. It’s just profoundly ominous and every time I go to the coast after dark I recall this narrative that ruined the ocean after dark in my view – in a good way.

The young couple – she’s very young, he’s not – go back to the inn and discover why the bells ring, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and death-and-the-maiden intersects with dance of death pandemonium. It’s an unnerving meditation about longing and decline, a pair of individuals aging together as a couple, the attachment and aggression and tenderness in matrimony.

Not only the most frightening, but likely among the finest brief tales out there, and a beloved choice. I read it in Spanish, in the initial publication of these tales to be published in Argentina in 2011.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I delved into Zombie near the water overseas recently. Although it was sunny I felt cold creep through me. I also experienced the excitement of fascination. I was writing a new project, and I had hit a block. I didn’t know if it was possible an effective approach to write various frightening aspects the story includes. Reading Zombie, I understood that it could be done.

Released decades ago, the novel is a dark flight through the mind of a young serial killer, the protagonist, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who murdered and mutilated numerous individuals in a city over a decade. Infamously, the killer was consumed with making a zombie sex slave that would remain by his side and carried out several macabre trials to achieve this.

The deeds the novel describes are terrible, but equally frightening is its psychological persuasiveness. The protagonist’s dreadful, shattered existence is directly described with concise language, names redacted. You is immersed caught in his thoughts, forced to see thoughts and actions that horrify. The strangeness of his psyche is like a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Going into this book is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and subsequently commenced having night terrors. On one occasion, the terror included a vision where I was trapped inside a container and, when I woke up, I realized that I had removed a part off the window, trying to get out. That home was decaying; when it rained heavily the entranceway flooded, fly larvae came down from the roof into the bedroom, and at one time a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in that space.

When a friend presented me with this author’s book, I had moved out at my family home, but the tale of the house high on the Dover cliffs appeared known to myself, homesick at that time. This is a novel about a haunted noisy, emotional house and a female character who ingests calcium from the shoreline. I loved the novel immensely and returned again and again to it, always finding {something