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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by a master of suspense

I read this tale some time back and it has stayed with me since then. The titular “summer people” happen to be a family from New York, who lease a particular isolated country cottage annually. This time, rather than returning to the city, they opt to extend their vacation a few more weeks – something that seems to alarm everyone in the surrounding community. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that no one has ever stayed at the lake past the holiday. Nonetheless, the Allisons insist to not leave, and that’s when situations commence to grow more bizarre. The person who delivers the kerosene refuses to sell to the couple. Nobody will deliver groceries to the cabin, and when they try to drive into town, the car refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the power in the radio fade, and when night comes, “the elderly couple huddled together in their summer cottage and expected”. What could be this couple waiting for? What could the townspeople understand? Every time I peruse the writer’s unnerving and influential tale, I’m reminded that the finest fright stems from that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative two people journey to a common coastal village in which chimes sound constantly, an incessant ringing that is irritating and unexplainable. The first very scary moment occurs at night, when they opt to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the sea. There’s sand, there is the odor of rotting fish and seawater, there are waves, but the sea appears spectral, or something else and worse. It’s just insanely sinister and each occasion I travel to the coast in the evening I recall this narrative that destroyed the sea at night for me – in a good way.

The young couple – she’s very young, the husband is older – head back to the inn and find out the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of confinement, macabre revelry and mortality and youth encounters dance of death pandemonium. It is a disturbing meditation on desire and decline, a pair of individuals aging together as spouses, the connection and aggression and tenderness of marriage.

Not only the most frightening, but probably a top example of concise narratives in existence, and an individual preference. I encountered it in Spanish, in the first edition of this author’s works to appear locally a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer

I perused Zombie beside the swimming area in the French countryside in 2020. Despite the sunshine I experienced cold creep over me. I also felt the electricity of fascination. I was writing my third novel, and I faced a wall. I was uncertain whether there existed any good way to write certain terrifying elements the story includes. Reading Zombie, I understood that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the novel is a bleak exploration through the mind of a young serial killer, the protagonist, modeled after a notorious figure, the murderer who slaughtered and cut apart numerous individuals in a city during a specific period. As is well-known, the killer was obsessed with producing a zombie sex slave who would stay him and made many macabre trials to do so.

The actions the novel describes are horrific, but just as scary is its mental realism. The protagonist’s awful, shattered existence is plainly told in spare prose, identities hidden. The audience is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, 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. Entering this book is not just reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching from a gifted writer

In my early years, I walked in my sleep and eventually began experiencing nightmares. At one point, the fear included a vision during which I was trapped within an enclosure and, as I roused, I found that I had removed the slat out of the window frame, attempting to escape. That building was decaying; when storms came the ground floor corridor filled with water, insect eggs fell from the ceiling on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a big rodent ascended the window coverings in that space.

Once a companion gave me the story, I had moved out in my childhood residence, but the narrative about the home high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to me, longing as I was. It is a novel concerning a ghostly noisy, sentimental building and a girl who eats limestone from the cliffs. I cherished the story deeply and came back frequently to its pages, always finding {something