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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I discovered this tale some time back and it has haunted me since then. The named vacationers turn out to be the Allisons from New York, who occupy a particular remote lakeside house every summer. This time, instead of returning home, they decide to lengthen their vacation for a month longer – a decision that to unsettle all the locals in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys the same veiled caution that not a soul has remained by the water past the holiday. Nonetheless, the couple are resolved to remain, and that is the moment events begin to become stranger. The man who delivers oil declines to provide for them. Not a single person agrees to bring supplies to the cottage, and at the time the family try to drive into town, the car won’t start. A tempest builds, the energy within the device die, and when night comes, “the aged individuals huddled together inside their cabin and waited”. What are the Allisons expecting? What do the residents be aware of? Every time I read the writer’s unnerving and thought-provoking tale, I recall that the finest fright comes from what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a pair journey to a typical seaside town where bells ring the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is annoying and puzzling. The first truly frightening moment happens during the evening, when they decide to take a walk and they fail to see the ocean. There’s sand, there is the odor of putrid marine life and brine, there are waves, but the sea seems phantom, or a different entity and even more alarming. It is simply insanely sinister and whenever I travel to the shore after dark I remember this tale that destroyed the ocean after dark for me – favorably.

The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – go back to the hotel and find out the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and demise and innocence intersects with danse macabre pandemonium. It’s a chilling meditation about longing and deterioration, two people growing old jointly as partners, the connection and brutality and gentleness within wedlock.

Not merely the most terrifying, but perhaps among the finest short stories available, and a personal favourite. I read it in Spanish, in the first edition of this author’s works to be released locally in 2011.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this book near the water in the French countryside a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I sensed cold creep within me. I also felt the excitement of fascination. I was working on my latest book, and I faced a wall. I wasn’t sure whether there existed an effective approach to compose certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Going through this book, I realized that it could be done.

Released decades ago, the story is a grim journey into the thoughts of a murderer, Quentin P, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who killed and dismembered multiple victims in a city over a decade. As is well-known, this person was obsessed with making a compliant victim who would never leave him and attempted numerous macabre trials to accomplish it.

The acts the novel describes are horrific, but equally frightening is the mental realism. Quentin P’s terrible, shattered existence is directly described in spare prose, identities hidden. The reader is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, forced to see thoughts and actions that horrify. The foreignness of his mind resembles a tangible impact – or finding oneself isolated on a desolate planet. Going into this story is less like reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from a gifted writer

During my youth, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced having night terrors. On one occasion, the fear involved a nightmare where I was trapped in a box and, upon awakening, I found that I had torn off a piece out of the window frame, attempting to escape. That home was falling apart; when storms came the ground floor corridor became inundated, insect eggs dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and once a large rat scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

After an acquaintance presented me with this author’s book, I had moved out with my parents, but the story of the house high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable in my view, homesick as I felt. This is a book featuring a possessed loud, atmospheric home and a female character who consumes chalk from the shoreline. I cherished the story so much and returned repeatedly to the story, consistently uncovering {something