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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson

I discovered this story years ago and it has stayed with me from that moment. The titular vacationers are a family from the city, who lease an identical off-grid country cottage every summer. This time, in place of going back home, they choose to extend their stay a few more weeks – an action that appears to alarm all the locals in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys the same veiled caution that no one has remained in the area past Labor Day. Regardless, the couple are resolved to remain, and that is the moment events begin to grow more bizarre. The person who brings fuel won’t sell for them. Not a single person is willing to supply supplies to the cabin, and when the Allisons endeavor to drive into town, their vehicle refuses to operate. A storm gathers, the power within the device fade, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple huddled together inside their cabin and waited”. What might be the Allisons expecting? What might the residents know? Every time I read this author’s unnerving and thought-provoking narrative, I remember that the finest fright comes from the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a pair travel to a typical seaside town where bells ring the whole time, a constant chiming that is irritating and unexplainable. The opening extremely terrifying episode occurs after dark, at the time they opt to walk around and they can’t find the sea. The beach is there, the scent exists of rotting fish and brine, there are waves, but the ocean is a ghost, or a different entity and even more alarming. It’s just deeply malevolent and every time I visit to the coast after dark I think about this story that ruined the sea at night in my view – in a good way.

The young couple – she’s very young, the man is mature – go back to the hotel and learn why the bells ring, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden encounters dance of death bedlam. It’s a chilling contemplation about longing and deterioration, a pair of individuals aging together as spouses, the attachment and violence and gentleness in matrimony.

Not just the most frightening, but likely one of the best concise narratives available, and an individual preference. I encountered it en español, in the debut release of Aickman stories to appear locally a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates

I read Zombie beside the swimming area in the French countryside a few years ago. Although it was sunny I sensed cold creep over me. I also felt the excitement of fascination. I was composing my third novel, and I faced a block. I wasn’t sure if there was an effective approach to craft various frightening aspects the book contains. Going through this book, I saw that it could be done.

Released decades ago, the story is a grim journey within the psyche of a criminal, the main character, based on an infamous individual, the murderer who killed and dismembered 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, the killer was fixated with making a submissive individual who would stay by his side and attempted numerous grisly attempts to achieve this.

The acts the novel describes are appalling, but equally frightening is its own emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s dreadful, shattered existence is simply narrated using minimal words, identities hidden. The reader is sunk deep stuck in his mind, forced to witness mental processes and behaviors that appal. The foreignness of his psyche is like a tangible impact – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Starting this story feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and later started having night terrors. At one point, the horror included a vision in which I was confined in a box and, upon awakening, I realized that I had torn off a part off the window, seeking to leave. That building was decaying; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall filled with water, maggots dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and once a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in that space.

When a friend presented me with this author’s book, I had moved out with my parents, but the story of the house high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to myself, homesick as I was. This is a book about a haunted noisy, atmospheric home and a young woman who eats calcium from the shoreline. I cherished the story so much and came back frequently to its pages, always finding {something