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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I discovered this story years ago and it has stayed with me ever since. The named seasonal visitors turn out to be the Allisons from the city, who lease a particular isolated rural cabin each year. This time, in place of heading back to the city, they decide to extend their holiday an extra month – something that seems to alarm everyone in the nearby town. Each repeats a similar vague warning that nobody has lingered at the lake beyond the holiday. Nonetheless, the couple are resolved to not leave, and that is the moment events begin to become stranger. The individual who delivers oil refuses to sell to them. Nobody will deliver supplies to the cabin, and as they attempt to go to the village, their vehicle won’t start. A storm gathers, the energy of their radio die, and when night comes, “the aged individuals huddled together inside their cabin and waited”. What might be this couple expecting? What could the locals understand? Each occasion I revisit this author’s unnerving and influential story, I recall that the best horror comes from what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by a noted author

In this brief tale a couple travel to an ordinary coastal village where bells ring continuously, a constant chiming that is annoying and unexplainable. The opening truly frightening scene happens at night, when they decide to walk around and they can’t find the ocean. Sand is present, there’s the smell of rotting fish and salt, waves crash, but the ocean appears spectral, or a different entity and worse. It’s just insanely sinister and whenever I visit to the coast at night I think about this narrative that ruined the sea at night to my mind – in a good way.

The young couple – she’s very young, he’s not – head back to the hotel and learn the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and demise and innocence intersects with dance of death bedlam. It’s a chilling meditation about longing and decay, a pair of individuals maturing in tandem as a couple, the bond and brutality and affection of marriage.

Not only the most terrifying, but likely one of the best brief tales available, and an individual preference. I encountered it in Spanish, in the debut release of Aickman stories to be published in this country several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from an esteemed writer

I read Zombie beside the swimming area in the French countryside in 2020. Despite the sunshine I sensed a chill over me. I also felt the thrill of excitement. I was writing my latest book, and I encountered an obstacle. I didn’t know if there was a proper method to write certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I understood that it was possible.

Published in 1995, the novel is a bleak exploration within the psyche of a criminal, the protagonist, inspired by a notorious figure, the murderer who killed and cut apart multiple victims in a city during a specific period. Notoriously, this person was fixated with creating a zombie sex slave who would never leave with him and attempted numerous grisly attempts to do so.

The deeds the book depicts are horrific, but equally frightening is the emotional authenticity. Quentin P’s dreadful, shattered existence is simply narrated in spare prose, identities hidden. You is immersed stuck in his mind, compelled to see mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The strangeness of his thinking resembles a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Going into Zombie is not just reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I walked in my sleep and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. Once, the fear included a vision in which I was confined in a box and, when I woke up, I realized that I had ripped a piece from the window, attempting to escape. That home was decaying; during heavy rain the entranceway filled with water, maggots came down from the roof onto the bed, and at one time a big rodent climbed the drapes in the bedroom.

Once a companion presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the story of the house located on the coastline appeared known to me, longing as I felt. It is a book concerning a ghostly noisy, emotional house and a female character who ingests limestone off the rocks. I cherished the novel deeply and went back again and again to the story, always finding {something