🔗 Share this article

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson

I encountered this story years ago and it has haunted me from that moment. The named “summer people” are the Allisons urban dwellers, who rent an identical isolated lakeside house each year. This time, rather than returning to the city, they opt to prolong their vacation an extra month – a decision that to alarm all the locals in the surrounding community. Each repeats the same veiled caution that nobody has ever stayed in the area beyond the holiday. Regardless, the Allisons are resolved to not leave, and that’s when events begin to grow more bizarre. The man who brings oil declines to provide for them. No one will deliver groceries to the cabin, and as the family attempt to go to the village, the automobile refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the energy in the radio diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people crowded closely within their rental and expected”. What are the Allisons expecting? What could the locals be aware of? Whenever I read the writer’s unnerving and inspiring narrative, I’m reminded that the finest fright stems from that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a couple travel to a typical seaside town in which chimes sound continuously, a constant chiming that is irritating and inexplicable. The first extremely terrifying scene occurs during the evening, when they decide to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the sea. The beach is there, the scent exists of rotting fish and seawater, surf is audible, but the sea seems phantom, or something else and even more alarming. It is simply profoundly ominous and every time I visit to the shore at night I recall this narrative that destroyed the sea at night for me – positively.

The recent spouses – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – go back to the hotel and learn the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth encounters grim ballet chaos. It’s an unnerving meditation on desire and deterioration, two people growing old jointly as spouses, the connection and violence and affection of marriage.

Not merely the most frightening, but probably one of the best concise narratives out there, and a personal favourite. I read it in Spanish, in the first edition of this author’s works to be released in Argentina several years back.

Catriona Ward

Zombie from an esteemed writer

I perused Zombie by a pool in France in 2020. Despite the sunshine I felt a chill through me. Additionally, I sensed the excitement of excitement. I was composing a new project, and I faced a wall. I was uncertain if there was an effective approach to compose some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Going through this book, I saw that it could be done.

Released decades ago, the book is a dark flight within the psyche of a criminal, Quentin P, inspired by an infamous individual, the criminal who murdered and cut apart numerous individuals in Milwaukee during a specific period. Notoriously, this person was obsessed with producing a zombie sex slave who would stay with him and carried out several macabre trials to accomplish it.

The deeds the story tells are terrible, but just as scary is its mental realism. The protagonist’s terrible, broken reality is directly described with concise language, names redacted. The audience is immersed stuck in his mind, forced to observe mental processes and behaviors that shock. The strangeness of his psyche resembles a tangible impact – or being stranded in an empty realm. Going into this story is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by a gifted writer

In my early years, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced having night terrors. At one point, the horror featured a vision where I was trapped inside a container and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had torn off the slat out of the window frame, trying to get out. That home was decaying; when storms came the downstairs hall filled with water, fly larvae dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and once a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in that space.

Once a companion handed me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living in my childhood residence, but the narrative of the house located on the coastline appeared known to me, nostalgic as I was. It is a novel featuring a possessed clamorous, atmospheric home and a young woman who eats limestone off the rocks. I adored the story deeply and went back again and again to the story, each time discovering {something