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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I read this narrative years ago and it has lingered with me from that moment. The so-called seasonal visitors turn out to be a couple from the city, who occupy an identical off-grid country cottage every summer. During this visit, rather than returning to the city, they decide to extend their holiday for a month longer – a decision that to disturb each resident in the nearby town. All pass on the same veiled caution that nobody has lingered by the water beyond the holiday. Even so, the Allisons are resolved to not leave, and at that point things start to grow more bizarre. The individual who delivers fuel won’t sell to the couple. No one is willing to supply supplies to their home, and at the time they attempt to drive into town, their vehicle fails to start. A storm gathers, the batteries within the device die, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals huddled together inside their cabin and waited”. What are they expecting? What might the residents be aware of? Every time I revisit the writer’s chilling and inspiring narrative, I’m reminded that the finest fright stems from that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by a noted author

In this short story a pair go to an ordinary seaside town where church bells toll the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is annoying and unexplainable. The opening truly frightening scene takes place at night, when they opt to take a walk and they can’t find the water. Sand is present, there is the odor of putrid marine life and brine, surf is audible, but the sea appears spectral, or something else and worse. It is truly insanely sinister and whenever I travel to a beach at night I recall this story that ruined the ocean after dark for me – favorably.

The newlyweds – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – head back to the hotel and find out the reason for the chiming, during a prolonged scene of confinement, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden encounters danse macabre bedlam. It is a disturbing meditation about longing and deterioration, a pair of individuals aging together as partners, the attachment and brutality and tenderness in matrimony.

Not merely the most frightening, but probably one of the best brief tales in existence, and a beloved choice. I experienced it in Spanish, in the initial publication of these tales to be released in Argentina a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I delved into this narrative by a pool in the French countryside in 2020. Although it was sunny I experienced cold creep through me. I also felt the electricity of fascination. I was writing my latest book, and I had hit a block. I wasn’t sure if it was possible any good way to craft certain terrifying elements the book contains. Going through this book, I understood that there was a way.

Released decades ago, the novel is a dark flight through the mind of a murderer, the protagonist, based on a notorious figure, the criminal who slaughtered and dismembered numerous individuals in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, the killer was consumed with making a zombie sex slave who would stay him and carried out several macabre trials to achieve this.

The deeds the story tells are appalling, but just as scary is its own emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s dreadful, broken reality is simply narrated using minimal words, identities hidden. The reader is plunged trapped in his consciousness, forced to observe mental processes and behaviors that shock. The strangeness of his mind resembles a tangible impact – or finding oneself isolated on a desolate planet. Entering this story feels different from 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 experiencing nightmares. Once, the terror featured a dream where I was confined inside a container and, as I roused, I discovered that I had torn off a part out of the window frame, trying to get out. That house was crumbling; when it rained heavily the entranceway flooded, insect eggs fell from the ceiling onto the bed, and once a sizeable vermin climbed the drapes in that space.

When a friend presented me with this author’s book, I was no longer living at my family home, but the narrative about the home perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable to me, longing as I felt. It is a book featuring a possessed noisy, sentimental building and a female character who ingests limestone from the cliffs. I cherished the novel so much and went back repeatedly to its pages, always finding {something