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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from a master of suspense

I discovered this story some time back and it has lingered with me from that moment. The so-called vacationers turn out to be a couple from the city, who occupy a particular isolated lakeside house each year. This time, instead of returning to the city, they decide to extend their holiday a few more weeks – something that seems to unsettle everyone in the adjacent village. Each repeats a similar vague warning that no one has lingered at the lake past Labor Day. Nonetheless, the Allisons are determined to stay, and at that point things start to get increasingly weird. The person who delivers oil won’t sell to the couple. Not a single person agrees to bring groceries to their home, and as the Allisons endeavor to go to the village, their vehicle won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the batteries in the radio fade, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple clung to each other inside their cabin and expected”. What could be they expecting? What could the residents know? Whenever I revisit this author’s chilling and thought-provoking tale, I remember that the top terror comes from what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this short story two people journey to a typical seaside town where bells ring the whole time, a constant chiming that is annoying and inexplicable. The opening very scary moment takes place after dark, as they decide to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the ocean. There’s sand, there is the odor of decaying seafood and salt, surf is audible, but the ocean is a ghost, or a different entity and more dreadful. It’s just deeply malevolent and whenever I travel to the coast at night I remember this narrative that ruined the ocean after dark to my mind – in a good way.

The newlyweds – she’s very young, the man is mature – go back to the hotel and learn the cause of the ringing, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and death-and-the-maiden intersects with danse macabre pandemonium. It’s an unnerving reflection about longing and decay, a pair of individuals maturing in tandem as a couple, the bond and violence and gentleness of marriage.

Not only the most terrifying, but likely among the finest brief tales out there, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of these tales to be published locally several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this book near the water overseas in 2020. Even with the bright weather I experienced cold creep through me. I also experienced the excitement of anticipation. I was writing my third novel, and I faced a wall. I wasn’t sure if it was possible any good way to write certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Experiencing this novel, I saw that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a grim journey within the psyche of a murderer, Quentin P, based on an infamous individual, the criminal who killed and mutilated 17 young men and boys in a city between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, Dahmer was consumed with making a zombie sex slave who would stay him and carried out several macabre trials to do so.

The actions the book depicts are horrific, but similarly terrifying is its psychological persuasiveness. The protagonist’s awful, broken reality is simply narrated using minimal words, details omitted. The audience is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, compelled to witness ideas and deeds that shock. The foreignness of his psyche is like a physical shock – or being stranded in an empty realm. Starting this story feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from a gifted writer

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and eventually began having night terrors. Once, the horror involved a vision where I was stuck inside a container and, when I woke up, I found that I had torn off a piece from the window, attempting to escape. That home was decaying; when it rained heavily the entranceway became inundated, fly larvae came down from the roof onto the bed, and once a large rat climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.

After an acquaintance handed me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out at my family home, but the tale of the house high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to myself, longing at that time. This is a novel about a haunted clamorous, emotional house and a young woman who ingests calcium from the shoreline. I loved the novel deeply and came back frequently to its pages, consistently uncovering {something