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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by a master of suspense

I encountered this story long ago and it has lingered with me since then. The titular vacationers happen to be the Allisons from the city, who occupy the same isolated rural cabin every summer. This time, in place of going back home, they choose to extend their holiday a few more weeks – something that seems to unsettle each resident in the adjacent village. All pass on a similar vague warning that no one has ever stayed in the area after the end of summer. Even so, the couple are determined to not leave, and that’s when situations commence to get increasingly weird. The man who supplies the kerosene refuses to sell to them. Not a single person will deliver groceries to the cottage, and when the Allisons endeavor to go to the village, the car refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the power in the radio fade, and when night comes, “the aged individuals clung to each other within their rental and waited”. What could be they expecting? What could the townspeople know? Every time I read Jackson’s unnerving and inspiring narrative, I’m reminded that the best horror stems from what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes from a noted author

In this brief tale a pair go to an ordinary beach community where bells ring constantly, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and unexplainable. The initial extremely terrifying moment occurs at night, when they decide to go for a stroll and they can’t find the water. There’s sand, the scent exists of rotting fish and salt, waves crash, but the water is a ghost, or something else and even more alarming. It is simply deeply malevolent and every time I visit to the shore after dark I recall this narrative which spoiled the sea at night for me – favorably.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, the husband is older – return to the inn and learn the reason for the chiming, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth encounters dance of death bedlam. It is a disturbing contemplation on desire and decay, two bodies aging together as spouses, the attachment and brutality and gentleness within wedlock.

Not only the most terrifying, but perhaps among the finest concise narratives in existence, and an individual preference. I read it in Spanish, in the first edition of these tales to be released in Argentina a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer

I read this book near the water in the French countryside a few years ago. Despite the sunshine I felt an icy feeling over me. I also felt the electricity of anticipation. I was writing a new project, and I had hit a wall. I was uncertain if it was possible a proper method to write certain terrifying elements the book contains. Reading Zombie, I realized that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a dark flight within the psyche of a murderer, the main character, based on a notorious figure, the criminal who slaughtered and dismembered numerous individuals in a city between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, this person was obsessed with producing a compliant victim who would never leave by his side and attempted numerous horrific efforts to do so.

The deeds the book depicts are terrible, but similarly terrifying is its mental realism. The character’s terrible, fragmented world is simply narrated using minimal words, details omitted. The reader is plunged trapped in his consciousness, compelled to see ideas and deeds that horrify. The foreignness of his psyche feels like a tangible impact – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Entering Zombie feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I walked in my sleep and later started suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the terror featured a vision where I was confined inside a container and, upon awakening, I found that I had torn off the slat from the window, trying to get out. That building was decaying; when it rained heavily the entranceway flooded, insect eggs came down from the roof onto the bed, and at one time a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in my sister’s room.

Once a companion gave me the story, I had moved out at my family home, but the story about the home high on the Dover cliffs appeared known to me, nostalgic at that time. This is a book about a haunted loud, atmospheric home and a female character who consumes limestone off the rocks. I loved the book so much and went back repeatedly to it, consistently uncovering {something