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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson

I discovered this tale years ago and it has lingered with me since then. The titular “summer people” are a family from the city, who lease an identical off-grid lakeside house each year. During this visit, instead of going back home, they choose to extend their vacation for a month longer – something that seems to alarm everyone in the surrounding community. All pass on an identical cryptic advice that not a soul has lingered at the lake past Labor Day. Even so, the couple are determined to not leave, and that’s when events begin to become stranger. The person who supplies the kerosene declines to provide to the couple. Nobody is willing to supply supplies to the cottage, and at the time they try to go to the village, the car fails to start. A storm gathers, the energy within the device fade, and as darkness falls, “the two old people huddled together inside their cabin and anticipated”. What are they anticipating? What could the townspeople know? Each occasion I read the writer’s disturbing and influential tale, I recall that the finest fright originates in what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes from a noted author

In this brief tale a couple travel to a typical coastal village where bells ring the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is irritating and puzzling. The opening very scary scene occurs during the evening, when they decide to take a walk and they fail to see the water. Sand is present, the scent exists of rotting fish and brine, waves crash, but the sea is a ghost, or something else and even more alarming. It is truly insanely sinister and whenever I visit to a beach in the evening I remember this tale that ruined the sea at night for me – positively.

The newlyweds – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – return to their lodging and find out the cause of the ringing, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and demise and innocence intersects with danse macabre pandemonium. It’s a chilling reflection regarding craving and deterioration, a pair of individuals aging together as spouses, the attachment and brutality and tenderness of marriage.

Not just the most terrifying, but perhaps a top example of brief tales available, and a beloved choice. I read it in Spanish, in the debut release of this author’s works to appear in Argentina in 2011.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I perused this book beside the swimming area overseas in 2020. Even with the bright weather I experienced a chill within me. Additionally, I sensed the thrill of anticipation. I was working on a new project, and I faced a wall. I wasn’t sure whether there existed any good way to write various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Going through this book, I realized that it was possible.

Published in 1995, the story is a dark flight into the thoughts of a young serial killer, the main character, modeled after an infamous individual, the murderer who killed and dismembered 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee during a specific period. Notoriously, Dahmer was obsessed with creating a submissive individual who would never leave him and carried out several macabre trials to achieve this.

The acts the book depicts are horrific, but equally frightening is its emotional authenticity. Quentin P’s terrible, fragmented world is directly described with concise language, details omitted. You is plunged stuck in his mind, compelled to observe mental processes and behaviors that appal. The strangeness of his mind is like a physical shock – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Going into this story is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I was a somnambulist and later started experiencing nightmares. At one point, the terror involved a nightmare where I was stuck inside a container and, upon awakening, I realized that I had torn off a piece out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That home was crumbling; when it rained heavily the entranceway filled with water, insect eggs dropped from above onto the bed, and on one occasion a big rodent scaled the curtains in that space.

After an acquaintance gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out with my parents, but the narrative regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to me, longing as I was. It is a story concerning a ghostly clamorous, atmospheric home and a female character who ingests limestone from the cliffs. I loved the book deeply and returned again and again to its pages, consistently uncovering {something