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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I encountered this tale long ago and it has lingered with me ever since. The titular vacationers happen to be a family from the city, who lease a particular off-grid rural cabin every summer. On this occasion, in place of heading back to urban life, they decide to extend their holiday for a month longer – an action that appears to disturb all the locals in the nearby town. Everyone conveys the same veiled caution that no one has remained in the area after the end of summer. Nonetheless, the couple are determined to stay, and at that point things start to become stranger. The individual who delivers the kerosene refuses to sell for them. Not a single person will deliver food to the cabin, and at the time the family endeavor to travel to the community, the automobile refuses to operate. A storm gathers, the batteries within the device fade, and when night comes, “the two old people clung to each other inside their cabin and expected”. What are they expecting? What could the residents be aware of? Each occasion I read this author’s chilling and influential narrative, I remember that the best horror comes from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this short story a couple travel to a typical beach community where bells ring constantly, a constant chiming that is annoying and unexplainable. The initial extremely terrifying moment happens after dark, at the time they decide to take a walk and they can’t find the sea. There’s sand, there is the odor of decaying seafood and salt, waves crash, but the water seems phantom, or something else and more dreadful. It is truly deeply malevolent and every time I go to the coast at night I remember this tale which spoiled the ocean after dark for me – in a good way.

The recent spouses – the wife is youthful, the husband is older – go back to their lodging and find out the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and death-and-the-maiden encounters dance of death bedlam. It’s an unnerving reflection on desire and decay, a pair of individuals growing old jointly as partners, the attachment and brutality and affection in matrimony.

Not merely the most frightening, but probably among the finest concise narratives out there, and a beloved choice. I experienced it en español, in the first edition of these tales to be published locally in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from an esteemed writer

I read this narrative beside the swimming area in the French countryside a few years ago. Despite the sunshine I felt an icy feeling over me. I also felt the excitement of fascination. I was working on my latest book, and I had hit a block. I was uncertain whether there existed a proper method to write certain terrifying elements the book contains. Experiencing this novel, I understood that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a grim journey into the thoughts of a young serial killer, Quentin P, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who slaughtered and cut apart multiple victims in the Midwest over a decade. As is well-known, this person was consumed with creating a compliant victim that would remain by his side and attempted numerous macabre trials to achieve this.

The actions the novel describes are horrific, but similarly terrifying is the psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s dreadful, shattered existence is directly described in spare prose, names redacted. The audience is plunged stuck in his mind, obliged to see thoughts and actions that shock. The alien nature of his thinking is like a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated on a desolate planet. Entering this book feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by a gifted writer

In my early years, I sleepwalked and eventually began having night terrors. On one occasion, the fear involved a nightmare where I was stuck in a box and, upon awakening, I realized that I had torn off the slat out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That building was falling apart; when it rained heavily the entranceway flooded, maggots dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and once a large rat ascended the window coverings in the bedroom.

After an acquaintance handed me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere at my family home, but the tale about the home located on the coastline seemed recognizable to me, nostalgic at that time. It’s a story concerning a ghostly clamorous, emotional house and a young woman who consumes calcium from the cliffs. I loved the book deeply and came back again and again to it, consistently uncovering {something