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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense

I encountered this tale long ago and it has haunted me from that moment. The titular “summer people” happen to be a couple urban dwellers, who rent an identical off-grid rural cabin each year. During this visit, rather than going back to the city, they opt to extend their holiday a few more weeks – a decision that to unsettle all the locals in the surrounding community. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that no one has lingered at the lake beyond the end of summer. Regardless, the couple are resolved to remain, and that is the moment things start to become stranger. The person who brings oil won’t sell to the couple. Not a single person is willing to supply supplies to the cottage, and at the time the Allisons endeavor to travel to the community, the car refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the batteries in the radio diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the aged individuals clung to each other within their rental and anticipated”. What might be this couple anticipating? What might the townspeople understand? Whenever I revisit the writer’s disturbing and influential tale, I’m reminded that the top terror originates in what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this brief tale two people journey to a common seaside town in which chimes sound continuously, a constant chiming that is annoying and unexplainable. The first very scary moment occurs during the evening, when they opt to walk around and they are unable to locate the ocean. There’s sand, there is the odor of putrid marine life and brine, surf is audible, but the sea appears spectral, or another thing and worse. It is simply profoundly ominous and each occasion I go to a beach in the evening I recall this story that destroyed the ocean after dark to my mind – positively.

The young couple – she’s very young, the husband is older – go back to the hotel and discover the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and mortality and youth encounters dance of death bedlam. It’s a chilling meditation on desire and decay, two bodies maturing in tandem as a couple, the bond and violence and gentleness of marriage.

Not just the most frightening, but perhaps among the finest concise narratives available, and a personal favourite. I read it en español, in the debut release of Aickman stories to be published locally a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this narrative by a pool in the French countryside in 2020. Even with the bright weather I sensed cold creep through me. I also experienced the electricity of excitement. I was writing a new project, and I had hit a wall. I was uncertain if there was an effective approach to write various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Going through this book, I understood that there was a way.

Published in 1995, the novel is a bleak exploration within the psyche of a murderer, the protagonist, inspired by a notorious figure, the murderer who killed and cut apart numerous individuals in Milwaukee over a decade. Infamously, the killer was fixated with creating a zombie sex slave that would remain by his side and carried out several macabre trials to achieve this.

The deeds the story tells are horrific, but similarly terrifying is its emotional authenticity. The character’s awful, fragmented world is directly described using minimal words, identities hidden. The audience is immersed stuck in his mind, compelled to observe mental processes and behaviors that appal. The foreignness of his thinking is like a bodily jolt – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Starting Zombie is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and subsequently commenced suffering from bad dreams. Once, the terror included a nightmare during which I was confined in a box and, as I roused, I discovered that I had removed a piece out of the window frame, attempting to escape. That building was crumbling; when storms came the downstairs hall became inundated, fly larvae fell from the ceiling onto the bed, and once a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in my sister’s room.

After an acquaintance presented me with this author’s book, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the story regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to me, homesick as I felt. It is a novel concerning a ghostly noisy, emotional house and a girl who consumes calcium from the cliffs. I adored the novel immensely and returned frequently to it, consistently uncovering {something