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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by a master of suspense

I encountered this tale years ago and it has haunted me from that moment. The titular “summer people” happen to be a family urban dwellers, who lease an identical off-grid rural cabin every summer. This time, in place of returning to urban life, they opt to prolong their vacation for a month longer – an action that appears to alarm all the locals in the nearby town. All pass on the same veiled caution that not a soul has remained by the water after Labor Day. Nonetheless, they are resolved to stay, and at that point events begin to become stranger. The man who brings fuel won’t sell to the couple. Not a single person will deliver food to their home, and as they try to travel to the community, the car won’t start. A tempest builds, the energy of their radio fade, and when night comes, “the aged individuals crowded closely within their rental and waited”. What could be they waiting for? What do the townspeople understand? Every time I peruse the writer’s chilling and inspiring tale, I’m reminded that the finest fright comes from that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a pair go to an ordinary seaside town where bells ring the whole time, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and unexplainable. The first truly frightening moment takes place at night, at the time they opt to go for a stroll and they can’t find the ocean. The beach is there, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and salt, there are waves, but the water seems phantom, or a different entity and more dreadful. It’s just insanely sinister and every time I go to the coast after dark I remember this narrative that destroyed the sea at night to my mind – in a good way.

The recent spouses – she’s very young, the husband is older – go back to their lodging and learn the reason for the chiming, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and demise and innocence meets dance of death bedlam. It’s an unnerving reflection about longing and deterioration, two bodies growing old jointly as partners, the attachment and violence and tenderness within wedlock.

Not just the most terrifying, but likely a top example of brief tales out there, and an individual preference. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of this author’s works to appear locally several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this narrative beside the swimming area in the French countryside in 2020. Although it was sunny I sensed an icy feeling through me. I also felt the thrill of excitement. I was working on a new project, and I encountered an obstacle. I was uncertain if there was any good way to write certain terrifying elements the book contains. Going through this book, I realized that there was a way.

Released decades ago, the novel is a dark flight into the thoughts of a murderer, the protagonist, based on an infamous individual, the serial killer who murdered and dismembered multiple victims in Milwaukee over a decade. Notoriously, the killer was obsessed with making a compliant victim who would never leave him and made many horrific efforts to do so.

The deeds the book depicts are terrible, but just as scary is its own mental realism. The protagonist’s awful, fragmented world is plainly told in spare prose, names redacted. The reader is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, obliged to witness mental processes and behaviors that shock. The strangeness of his thinking is like a bodily jolt – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Starting this book feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I walked in my sleep and eventually began experiencing nightmares. On one occasion, the fear featured a vision during which I was stuck within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I found that I had torn off a part off the window, trying to get out. That home was falling apart; when it rained heavily the ground floor corridor flooded, maggots came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a big rodent ascended the window coverings in that space.

After an acquaintance gave me this author’s book, I was residing elsewhere in my childhood residence, but the narrative of the house high on the Dover cliffs appeared known in my view, longing as I was. It is a novel featuring a possessed clamorous, emotional house and a young woman who consumes limestone from the cliffs. I loved the story immensely and returned again and again to the story, always finding {something