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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from a master of suspense

I read this story some time back and it has haunted me from that moment. The named vacationers are a family from the city, who occupy the same remote lakeside house each year. This time, rather than heading back home, they choose to lengthen their stay an extra month – an action that appears to alarm each resident in the nearby town. Each repeats the same veiled caution that no one has ever stayed in the area past the end of summer. Even so, the Allisons insist to stay, and that is the moment things start to grow more bizarre. The person who delivers fuel refuses to sell for them. Nobody agrees to bring groceries to their home, and when the Allisons try to travel to the community, the automobile won’t start. A tempest builds, the power of their radio die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple huddled together inside their cabin and expected”. What might be this couple expecting? What could the residents understand? Every time I revisit Jackson’s unnerving and influential story, I’m reminded that the top terror stems from that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by a noted author

In this concise narrative a pair travel to a common seaside town where church bells toll constantly, a constant chiming that is annoying and inexplicable. The first truly frightening scene occurs after dark, at the time they opt to walk around and they are unable to locate the water. The beach is there, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and salt, waves crash, but the water is a ghost, or another thing and more dreadful. It is simply profoundly ominous and every time I go to the shore in the evening I remember this tale that destroyed the ocean after dark for me – in a good way.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, the husband is older – return to the hotel and discover the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of confinement, gruesome festivities and demise and innocence meets danse macabre chaos. It is a disturbing reflection about longing and deterioration, two bodies aging together as a couple, the bond and violence and gentleness in matrimony.

Not merely the most terrifying, but likely one of the best short stories available, and a beloved choice. I encountered it en español, in the first edition of Aickman stories to appear in this country a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I delved into Zombie by a pool in France recently. Even with the bright weather I felt an icy feeling over me. I also felt the electricity of anticipation. I was working on a new project, and I encountered a wall. I wasn’t sure if there was an effective approach to write various frightening aspects the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I understood that it could be done.

Published in 1995, the story is a dark flight into the thoughts of a young serial killer, Quentin P, modeled after an infamous individual, the serial killer who murdered and mutilated numerous individuals in a city between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, this person was fixated with making a compliant victim who would never leave by his side and carried out several macabre trials to accomplish it.

The actions the novel describes are horrific, but just as scary is its emotional authenticity. The character’s terrible, shattered existence is plainly told in spare prose, names redacted. The reader is plunged trapped in his consciousness, forced to witness thoughts and actions that horrify. The alien nature of his mind feels like a physical shock – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Starting this book feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching from a gifted writer

When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and subsequently commenced having night terrors. Once, the fear involved a vision during which I was confined inside a container and, as I roused, I discovered that I had torn off the slat off the window, seeking to leave. That house was falling apart; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall became inundated, fly larvae dropped from above onto the bed, and once a large rat ascended the window coverings in that space.

When a friend gave me this author’s book, I was residing elsewhere in my childhood residence, but the story about the home high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to myself, longing as I felt. This is a story about a haunted loud, emotional house and a young woman who ingests limestone off the rocks. I cherished the book deeply and returned again and again to its pages, always finding {something