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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson

I encountered this story years ago and it has lingered with me from that moment. The named “summer people” happen to be a family urban dwellers, who occupy a particular off-grid country cottage every summer. This time, rather than going back to urban life, they choose to extend their stay an extra month – an action that appears to alarm all the locals in the surrounding community. Each repeats a similar vague warning that nobody has ever stayed at the lake after the end of summer. Nonetheless, the Allisons are determined to not leave, and at that point things start to become stranger. The person who brings fuel declines to provide to the couple. Nobody agrees to bring supplies to their home, and when the Allisons attempt to go to the village, their vehicle won’t start. A tempest builds, the energy in the radio diminish, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple clung to each other in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What could be they expecting? What do the townspeople understand? Each occasion I peruse Jackson’s disturbing and inspiring tale, I remember that the top terror stems from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a couple go to a common beach community where church bells toll continuously, an incessant ringing that is irritating and unexplainable. The initial very scary episode happens during the evening, as they opt to go for a stroll and they can’t find the sea. Sand is present, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and brine, surf is audible, but the water is a ghost, or another thing and more dreadful. It’s just profoundly ominous and each occasion I visit to a beach at night I remember this story that destroyed the sea at night to my mind – favorably.

The young couple – she’s very young, the husband is older – head back to their lodging and discover the reason for the chiming, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and death-and-the-maiden intersects with dance of death pandemonium. It’s a chilling meditation about longing and deterioration, two people growing old jointly as a couple, the bond and violence and gentleness within wedlock.

Not merely the scariest, but likely a top example of brief tales in existence, and an individual preference. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of this author’s works to be released locally a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I read this book near the water in France recently. Even with the bright weather I sensed an icy feeling within me. Additionally, I sensed the thrill of anticipation. I was working on a new project, and I had hit a wall. I was uncertain if it was possible an effective approach to craft various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I understood that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a grim journey into the thoughts of a young serial killer, the protagonist, based on a notorious figure, the criminal who killed and cut apart 17 young men and boys in a city between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, the killer was obsessed with producing a zombie sex slave who would never leave him and carried out several grisly attempts to achieve this.

The deeds the novel describes are terrible, but just as scary is its psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s awful, broken reality is directly described with concise language, names redacted. The reader is immersed trapped in his consciousness, compelled to witness ideas and deeds that horrify. The strangeness of his thinking resembles a tangible impact – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Starting this story is not just reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from a gifted writer

When I was a child, I sleepwalked and later started suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the fear involved a dream where I was confined within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I found that I had removed the slat from the window, attempting to escape. That home was falling apart; during heavy rain the downstairs hall flooded, fly larvae came down from the roof into the bedroom, and once a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

When a friend gave me the story, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the story regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to myself, nostalgic at that time. This is a story concerning a ghostly clamorous, atmospheric home and a girl who ingests chalk from the shoreline. I loved the story immensely and came back frequently to it, consistently uncovering {something