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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I read this narrative long ago and it has haunted me since then. The so-called seasonal visitors are a couple from the city, who lease a particular remote country cottage each year. This time, in place of heading back to the city, they choose to extend their stay for a month longer – an action that appears to unsettle everyone in the adjacent village. All pass on a similar vague warning that not a soul has lingered at the lake past the holiday. Nonetheless, the couple are resolved to not leave, and at that point things start to become stranger. The man who supplies fuel declines to provide to them. Not a single person agrees to bring groceries to the cabin, and at the time the family attempt to go to the village, their vehicle refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the power within the device die, and when night comes, “the two old people crowded closely inside their cabin and expected”. What could be this couple waiting for? What could the townspeople be aware of? Every time I read this author’s chilling and inspiring story, I’m reminded that the finest fright comes from what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes from a noted author

In this concise narrative a couple journey to a common beach community where church bells toll continuously, a constant chiming that is annoying and unexplainable. The initial truly frightening scene takes place during the evening, when they decide to go for a stroll and they fail to see the ocean. The beach is there, there’s the smell of rotting fish and seawater, there are waves, but the sea seems phantom, or a different entity and more dreadful. It’s just deeply malevolent and every time I visit to the coast in the evening I remember this tale that destroyed the beach in the evening for me – positively.

The young couple – she’s very young, the husband is older – head back to the inn and learn why the bells ring, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and death-and-the-maiden meets danse macabre pandemonium. It’s an unnerving reflection on desire and decline, two people growing old jointly as partners, the attachment and violence and gentleness within wedlock.

Not merely the most frightening, but likely one of the best concise narratives available, and a beloved choice. I experienced it in Spanish, in the initial publication of these tales to be published locally a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this narrative near the water overseas in 2020. Even with the bright weather I felt an icy feeling through me. I also experienced the excitement of fascination. I was writing a new project, and I faced a block. I didn’t know if it was possible any good way to craft some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Experiencing this novel, I realized that there was a way.

Published in 1995, the book is a dark flight through the mind of a murderer, the protagonist, inspired by an infamous individual, the criminal who murdered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in the Midwest during a specific period. Infamously, Dahmer was fixated with producing a submissive individual that would remain by his side and carried out several macabre trials to achieve this.

The deeds the book depicts are horrific, but equally frightening is the emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s dreadful, shattered existence is plainly told using minimal words, names redacted. The audience is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, forced to see ideas and deeds that appal. The strangeness of his mind feels like a bodily jolt – or getting lost in an empty realm. Going into this story is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

During my youth, I walked in my sleep and eventually began experiencing nightmares. On one occasion, the horror included a dream during which I was confined inside a container and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had removed a part out of the window frame, trying to get out. That home was crumbling; when storms came the ground floor corridor became inundated, fly larvae dropped from above into the bedroom, and on one occasion a big rodent scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

Once a companion handed me this author’s book, I had moved out in my childhood residence, but the tale about the home high on the Dover cliffs appeared known in my view, nostalgic at that time. It’s a novel concerning a ghostly noisy, sentimental building and a girl who eats calcium from the shoreline. I adored the story immensely and returned again and again to it, always finding {something