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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson

I read this narrative some time back and it has haunted me since then. The so-called vacationers happen to be a couple from New York, who lease a particular isolated rural cabin each year. During this visit, in place of returning to urban life, they decide to lengthen their stay a few more weeks – something that seems to disturb each resident in the nearby town. Each repeats an identical cryptic advice that not a soul has lingered in the area after the holiday. Nonetheless, they are determined to not leave, and that’s when things start to grow more bizarre. The person who supplies the kerosene declines to provide to them. No one agrees to bring food to the cabin, and at the time they attempt to drive into town, the car refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the energy of their radio die, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals huddled together in their summer cottage and waited”. What might be they anticipating? What could the townspeople understand? Each occasion I revisit Jackson’s disturbing and thought-provoking story, I’m reminded that the best horror originates in what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a couple go to a typical beach community in which chimes sound continuously, an incessant ringing that is irritating and unexplainable. The initial truly frightening episode takes place during the evening, as they opt to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the water. There’s sand, the scent exists of rotting fish and brine, there are waves, but the sea seems phantom, or a different entity and even more alarming. It is truly insanely sinister and whenever I travel to the coast after dark I think about this story which spoiled the beach in the evening in my view – in a good way.

The young couple – she’s very young, he’s not – head back to the inn and learn the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and mortality and youth intersects with dance of death pandemonium. It’s an unnerving meditation on desire and deterioration, two bodies aging together as a couple, the bond and brutality and gentleness of marriage.

Not only the scariest, but likely among the finest brief tales available, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of these tales to be released in Argentina in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I read this book near the water overseas in 2020. Even with the bright weather I experienced an icy feeling over me. I also experienced the excitement of fascination. I was composing my latest book, and I had hit a wall. I wasn’t sure if it was possible an effective approach to write some of the fearful things the story includes. Going through this book, I understood that it could be done.

Published in 1995, the story is a grim journey within the psyche of a murderer, Quentin P, modeled after an infamous individual, the serial killer who killed and mutilated 17 young men and boys in the Midwest during a specific period. Notoriously, the killer was obsessed with creating a submissive individual that would remain by his side and made many macabre trials to achieve this.

The deeds the book depicts are terrible, but equally frightening is its own mental realism. The protagonist’s dreadful, fragmented world is simply narrated in spare prose, identities hidden. The reader is immersed stuck in his mind, compelled to see thoughts and actions that horrify. The strangeness of his thinking is like a physical shock – or getting lost on a desolate planet. Going into Zombie feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced experiencing nightmares. At one point, the fear featured a nightmare where I was stuck within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I realized that I had ripped the slat off the window, trying to get out. That house was decaying; when storms came the ground floor corridor became inundated, insect eggs dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and once a large rat climbed the drapes in the bedroom.

When a friend handed me the story, I was no longer living with my parents, but the tale about the home perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable to me, nostalgic at that time. It’s a story featuring a possessed loud, sentimental building and a young woman who ingests calcium off the rocks. I adored the book deeply and went back frequently to the story, always finding {something