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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I discovered this narrative years ago and it has haunted me ever since. The titular seasonal visitors happen to be the Allisons urban dwellers, who rent a particular remote country cottage annually. This time, in place of heading back to the city, they choose to prolong their vacation for a month longer – something that seems to alarm everyone in the nearby town. Each repeats an identical cryptic advice that no one has lingered by the water beyond the holiday. Even so, they are resolved to remain, and that’s when situations commence to grow more bizarre. The person who supplies oil refuses to sell to them. Not a single person agrees to bring groceries to the cabin, and as the Allisons attempt to go to the village, the car refuses to operate. A storm gathers, the power in the radio die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people clung to each other inside their cabin and anticipated”. What might be the Allisons anticipating? What do the townspeople understand? Whenever I read the writer’s disturbing and thought-provoking tale, I recall that the top terror comes from what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by a noted author

In this concise narrative a pair go to a typical seaside town where bells ring constantly, a constant chiming that is bothersome and puzzling. The first extremely terrifying moment happens after dark, as they choose to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the sea. The beach is there, the scent exists of rotting fish and salt, there are waves, but the sea is a ghost, or a different entity and worse. It’s just deeply malevolent and every time I go to the shore at night I remember this story that destroyed the beach in the evening to my mind – favorably.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, he’s not – return to the hotel and discover why the bells ring, in a long sequence of confinement, gruesome festivities and demise and innocence encounters grim ballet chaos. It’s an unnerving meditation about longing and decline, two people growing old jointly as partners, the attachment and aggression and tenderness in matrimony.

Not just the most terrifying, but perhaps one of the best concise narratives in existence, and a personal favourite. I read it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to be released in this country a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this book by a pool in the French countryside a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I felt an icy feeling through me. I also felt the thrill of excitement. I was working on my third novel, and I encountered a block. I was uncertain whether there existed an effective approach to compose some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Going through this book, I saw that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the novel is a dark flight into the thoughts of a young serial killer, Quentin P, modeled after an infamous individual, the criminal who killed and dismembered numerous individuals in the Midwest over a decade. Infamously, Dahmer was obsessed with creating a submissive individual who would stay him and carried out several macabre trials to do so.

The deeds the novel describes are horrific, but equally frightening is its own emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s dreadful, fragmented world is simply narrated with concise language, details omitted. The reader is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, forced to see ideas and deeds that horrify. The foreignness of his thinking is like a tangible impact – or finding oneself isolated on a desolate planet. Entering this book is less like reading than a full body experience. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I walked in my sleep and eventually began experiencing nightmares. At one point, the terror featured a vision in which I was confined within an enclosure and, as I roused, I discovered that I had removed a piece from the window, attempting to escape. That home was crumbling; during heavy rain the entranceway became inundated, insect eggs came down from the roof onto the bed, and on one occasion a big rodent scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

Once a companion handed me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere in my childhood residence, but the narrative of the house located on the coastline appeared known to me, homesick as I felt. This is a book featuring a possessed clamorous, atmospheric home and a girl who eats chalk from the cliffs. I cherished the book immensely and returned frequently to its pages, consistently uncovering {something