🔗 Share this article

Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from a master of suspense

I read this narrative long ago and it has lingered with me ever since. The named vacationers turn out to be a couple from New York, who occupy a particular remote country cottage every summer. During this visit, instead of going back to urban life, they opt to lengthen their vacation for a month longer – something that seems to alarm all the locals in the surrounding community. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that no one has lingered by the water past the end of summer. Even so, they insist to not leave, and that is the moment things start to grow more bizarre. The man who delivers the kerosene refuses to sell to the couple. Not a single person will deliver supplies to their home, and when they try to travel to the community, their vehicle fails to start. A tempest builds, the power within the device fade, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people huddled together in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What might be they waiting for? What might the residents be aware of? Every time I read Jackson’s unnerving and influential story, I’m reminded that the finest fright originates in the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman

In this short story two people travel to a typical coastal village in which chimes sound the whole time, a constant chiming that is annoying and unexplainable. The first very scary moment takes place during the evening, as they choose to walk around and they fail to see the ocean. Sand is present, the scent exists of rotting fish and salt, surf is audible, but the water appears spectral, or a different entity and even more alarming. It is truly profoundly ominous and every time I travel to the shore after dark I remember this narrative that destroyed the ocean after dark to my mind – in a good way.

The newlyweds – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – go back to the hotel and discover the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth intersects with danse macabre chaos. It’s a chilling meditation regarding craving and deterioration, two people growing old jointly as a couple, the connection and violence and affection of marriage.

Not just the scariest, but perhaps among the finest short stories available, and a personal favourite. I read it in Spanish, in the first edition of these tales to be released in this country several years back.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer

I delved into this book by a pool overseas in 2020. Although it was sunny I experienced cold creep over me. I also experienced the thrill of fascination. I was working on my latest book, and I faced a wall. I didn’t know if it was possible an effective approach to compose some of the fearful things the story includes. Going through this book, I understood that it was possible.

Published in 1995, the book is a bleak exploration into the thoughts of a murderer, Quentin P, modeled after a notorious figure, the serial killer who murdered and dismembered multiple victims in the Midwest over a decade. Notoriously, this person was fixated with producing a submissive individual who would stay by his side and made many grisly attempts to accomplish it.

The deeds the book depicts are appalling, but similarly terrifying is its own psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s dreadful, broken reality is simply narrated in spare prose, details omitted. The reader is plunged caught in his thoughts, compelled to witness mental processes and behaviors that shock. The alien nature 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 consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced experiencing nightmares. Once, the horror included a nightmare during which I was stuck within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I found that I had torn off the slat from the window, attempting to escape. That house was decaying; when it rained heavily the entranceway filled with water, insect eggs dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and once a big rodent scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

Once a companion handed me the story, I had moved out with my parents, but the story about the home located on the coastline seemed recognizable to me, homesick as I felt. It is a novel about a haunted clamorous, sentimental building and a young woman who consumes calcium from the cliffs. I adored the book immensely and came back repeatedly to its pages, each time discovering {something