🔗 Share this article

Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by a master of suspense

I discovered this tale some time back and it has lingered with me from that moment. The named “summer people” turn out to be a family from the city, who lease the same isolated rural cabin each year. On this occasion, instead of going back home, they choose to lengthen their vacation an extra month – an action that appears to unsettle each resident in the nearby town. All pass on a similar vague warning that not a soul has ever stayed by the water past Labor Day. Regardless, the couple are resolved to remain, and that is the moment situations commence to grow more bizarre. The person who supplies oil declines to provide to them. Nobody will deliver supplies to the cottage, and when the Allisons try to go to the village, the car refuses to operate. A storm gathers, the energy of their radio diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the aged individuals crowded closely inside their cabin and waited”. What could be they waiting for? What could the residents understand? Every time I revisit this author’s unnerving and thought-provoking narrative, I recall that the finest fright comes from what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from a noted author

In this short story two people go to a typical coastal village in which chimes sound the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is irritating and unexplainable. The first very scary scene occurs at night, at the time they choose to walk around and they are unable to locate the sea. Sand is present, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and salt, surf is audible, but the water appears spectral, or a different entity and worse. It is truly insanely sinister and each occasion I go to the coast in the evening I remember this tale that destroyed the ocean after dark in my view – in a good way.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – return to the inn and discover the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden meets grim ballet chaos. It is a disturbing contemplation about longing and decline, a pair of individuals maturing in tandem as a couple, the attachment and brutality and affection in matrimony.

Not just the most terrifying, but probably among the finest concise narratives in existence, and a beloved choice. I encountered it en español, in the first edition of Aickman stories to be published in this country in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer

I perused Zombie by a pool overseas recently. Despite the sunshine I sensed cold creep within me. I also experienced the electricity of excitement. I was writing my third novel, and I faced a block. I didn’t know whether there existed any good way to compose certain terrifying elements the book contains. Experiencing this novel, I realized that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a grim journey into the thoughts of a criminal, Quentin P, inspired by a notorious figure, the criminal who murdered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, Dahmer was consumed with producing a submissive individual that would remain with him and made many horrific efforts to do so.

The deeds the story tells are terrible, but similarly terrifying is the mental realism. Quentin P’s dreadful, broken reality is simply narrated using minimal words, identities hidden. The reader is immersed stuck in his mind, compelled to witness thoughts and actions that shock. The alien nature of his mind is like a tangible impact – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Going into this story feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and subsequently commenced suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the horror involved a vision where I was stuck in a box and, as I roused, I discovered that I had torn off a piece out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That home was falling apart; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall became inundated, fly larvae fell from the ceiling on to my parents’ bed, and once a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in that space.

After an acquaintance gave me this author’s book, I had moved out at my family home, but the tale regarding the building perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable to me, homesick as I was. It is a story featuring a possessed noisy, atmospheric home and a female character who eats chalk from the shoreline. I cherished the book immensely and went back frequently to the story, consistently uncovering {something