🔗 Share this article

Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by a master of suspense

I encountered this tale long ago and it has haunted me ever since. The titular vacationers happen to be the Allisons from the city, who occupy an identical remote rural cabin annually. This time, instead of returning to urban life, they decide to prolong their holiday a few more weeks – something that seems to disturb everyone in the nearby town. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that nobody has ever stayed by the water past the holiday. Nonetheless, they are determined to stay, and that’s when things start to grow more bizarre. The man who supplies oil refuses to sell to them. Not a single person is willing to supply food to their home, and at the time the family try to drive into town, the automobile won’t start. A storm gathers, the batteries of their radio diminish, and when night comes, “the two old people huddled together within their rental and expected”. What might be they expecting? What might the residents know? Each occasion I read this author’s chilling and inspiring tale, I remember that the top terror stems from the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this short story a couple travel to an ordinary beach community where church bells toll the whole time, an incessant ringing that is irritating and unexplainable. The first truly frightening scene happens after dark, at the time they decide to go for a stroll and they can’t find the water. There’s sand, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and salt, waves crash, but the sea appears spectral, or another thing and even more alarming. It is simply profoundly ominous and each occasion I travel to the coast after dark I recall this story which spoiled the beach in the evening to my mind – in a good way.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, the husband is older – return to the inn and find out why the bells ring, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and demise and innocence intersects with dance of death pandemonium. It’s a chilling contemplation about longing and decline, two people aging together as spouses, the bond and brutality and tenderness in matrimony.

Not only the scariest, but probably among the finest brief tales available, and a beloved choice. I read it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of these tales to be released in Argentina a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I delved into Zombie by a pool overseas in 2020. Although it was sunny I sensed cold creep over me. I also felt the excitement of anticipation. I was writing a new project, and I had hit a block. I didn’t know whether there existed an effective approach to craft certain terrifying elements the story includes. Going through this book, I understood that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the book is a grim journey within the psyche of a young serial killer, the protagonist, modeled after a notorious figure, the serial killer who murdered and mutilated multiple victims in a city between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, the killer was obsessed with producing a submissive individual who would never leave with him and carried out several horrific efforts to achieve this.

The deeds the novel describes are appalling, but equally frightening is the mental realism. Quentin P’s dreadful, broken reality is directly described with concise language, details omitted. You is immersed trapped in his consciousness, forced to observe mental processes and behaviors that shock. The alien nature of his thinking is like a bodily jolt – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Entering this story is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by a gifted writer

When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and later started suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the horror included a nightmare in which I was confined in a box and, as I roused, I found that I had ripped the slat off the window, trying to get out. That building was crumbling; when storms came the ground floor corridor became inundated, fly larvae fell from the ceiling on to my parents’ bed, and at one time a big rodent ascended the window coverings in that space.

When a friend gave me this author’s book, I had moved out at my family home, but the story about the home perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable in my view, longing as I felt. It is a novel concerning a ghostly loud, sentimental building and a girl who consumes limestone off the rocks. I loved the novel so much and returned repeatedly to the story, always finding {something