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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by a master of suspense

I discovered this tale years ago and it has lingered with me from that moment. The so-called seasonal visitors happen to be a couple urban dwellers, who rent the same off-grid lakeside house annually. On this occasion, instead of going back to the city, they opt to extend their vacation a few more weeks – a decision that to alarm all the locals in the surrounding community. Each repeats an identical cryptic advice that not a soul has remained in the area past Labor Day. Regardless, the Allisons are resolved to remain, and that’s when events begin to get increasingly weird. The man who supplies the kerosene refuses to sell to the couple. No one agrees to bring groceries to their home, and as they try to go to the village, the car refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the power in the radio diminish, and when night comes, “the elderly couple clung to each other inside their cabin and anticipated”. What could be this couple expecting? What could the locals understand? Each occasion I revisit this author’s unnerving and thought-provoking story, I remember that the best horror originates in that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this short story a pair journey to a typical coastal village in which chimes sound constantly, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and puzzling. The initial very scary scene takes place during the evening, as they choose to walk around and they fail to see the water. There’s sand, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and seawater, surf is audible, but the ocean seems phantom, or a different entity and even more alarming. It is simply deeply malevolent and each occasion I go to a beach in the evening I think about this story that ruined the beach in the evening to my mind – favorably.

The newlyweds – she’s very young, the husband is older – return to the hotel and discover why the bells ring, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden meets grim ballet pandemonium. It’s a chilling meditation on desire and deterioration, two people maturing in tandem as spouses, the bond and brutality and affection within wedlock.

Not merely the most terrifying, but likely among the finest short stories out there, and an individual preference. I read it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of these tales to be published in Argentina a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I perused this book near the water in France recently. Although it was sunny I felt an icy feeling through me. I also felt the electricity of excitement. I was composing my latest book, and I faced a wall. I was uncertain if there was any good way to write certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Going through this book, I saw that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a dark flight within the psyche of a murderer, Quentin P, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who murdered and cut apart multiple victims in the Midwest over a decade. Notoriously, this person was obsessed with creating a zombie sex slave that would remain with him and made many grisly attempts to accomplish it.

The deeds the book depicts are appalling, but similarly terrifying is its mental realism. The protagonist’s awful, fragmented world is directly described using minimal words, names redacted. The reader is plunged trapped in his consciousness, forced to witness mental processes and behaviors that appal. The strangeness of his thinking feels like a physical shock – or being stranded in an empty realm. Starting this story is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and subsequently commenced suffering from bad dreams. Once, the terror involved a dream where I was confined in a box and, when I woke up, I found that I had torn off a piece off the window, seeking to leave. That home was crumbling; when storms came the downstairs hall filled with water, maggots dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in that space.

Once a companion handed me this author’s book, I was residing elsewhere at my family home, but the narrative about the home located on the coastline seemed recognizable to myself, homesick as I was. It is a book featuring a possessed clamorous, atmospheric home and a girl who consumes calcium from the cliffs. I adored the novel immensely and returned frequently to the story, always finding {something