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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by a master of suspense

I read this tale years ago and it has haunted me since then. The named “summer people” happen to be the Allisons urban dwellers, who rent an identical off-grid lakeside house annually. This time, rather than returning home, they choose to prolong their vacation an extra month – an action that appears to alarm all the locals in the nearby town. All pass on the same veiled caution that no one has remained by the water past the holiday. Regardless, they are determined to not leave, and that’s when events begin to grow more bizarre. The man who supplies fuel refuses to sell to them. Not a single person agrees to bring food to the cabin, and at the time the Allisons endeavor to drive into town, the automobile fails to start. A storm gathers, the energy within the device diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple crowded closely within their rental and waited”. What might be this couple expecting? What do the locals be aware of? Every time I read this author’s disturbing and inspiring tale, I recall that the finest fright originates in the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a couple go to a common beach community where bells ring the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is annoying and puzzling. The initial very scary episode happens at night, at the time they choose to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the water. Sand is present, there is the odor of decaying seafood and seawater, there are waves, but the sea is a ghost, or a different entity and more dreadful. It’s just deeply malevolent and each occasion I travel to a beach in the evening I remember this narrative that destroyed the ocean after dark for me – positively.

The young couple – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – return to the inn and find out why the bells ring, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and mortality and youth intersects with danse macabre bedlam. It’s a chilling contemplation regarding craving and decay, two bodies growing old jointly as partners, the attachment and violence and gentleness within wedlock.

Not merely the scariest, but probably a top example of concise narratives in existence, and a personal favourite. I read it in Spanish, in the initial publication of these tales to appear in Argentina several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I read Zombie by a pool in France a few years ago. Although it was sunny I sensed an icy feeling over me. Additionally, I sensed the electricity of anticipation. I was composing my third novel, and I had hit an obstacle. I didn’t know if there was any good way to compose various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Going through this book, I saw that it was possible.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a grim journey into the thoughts of a murderer, Quentin P, modeled after a notorious figure, the murderer who slaughtered and mutilated 17 young men and boys in the Midwest during a specific period. Notoriously, Dahmer was obsessed with creating a compliant victim that would remain him and attempted numerous horrific efforts to achieve this.

The actions the novel describes are horrific, but just as scary is the mental realism. Quentin P’s dreadful, shattered existence is directly described using minimal words, details omitted. The reader is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, forced to witness ideas and deeds that horrify. The foreignness of his thinking is like a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Entering Zombie feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and subsequently commenced experiencing nightmares. On one occasion, the horror featured a vision where I was confined inside a container and, as I roused, I discovered that I had removed the slat from the window, trying to get out. That home was crumbling; during heavy rain the downstairs hall filled with water, maggots came down from the roof onto the bed, and on one occasion a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in my sister’s room.

After an acquaintance gave me this author’s book, I was no longer living in my childhood residence, but the tale about the home located on the coastline felt familiar to myself, nostalgic at that time. It’s a novel concerning a ghostly noisy, sentimental building and a young woman who ingests calcium from the cliffs. I loved the story so much and went back frequently to its pages, consistently uncovering {something