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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by a master of suspense

I discovered this tale some time back and it has stayed with me since then. The titular “summer people” happen to be a family urban dwellers, who lease a particular remote rural cabin each year. During this visit, instead of heading back to the city, they decide to lengthen their vacation an extra month – something that seems to alarm each resident in the nearby town. All pass on a similar vague warning that nobody has ever stayed by the water after the end of summer. Nonetheless, the Allisons are resolved to stay, and at that point events begin to become stranger. The man who brings oil refuses to sell to them. Nobody agrees to bring supplies to the cabin, and at the time the Allisons attempt to go to the village, the car won’t start. A storm gathers, the batteries within the device fade, and when night comes, “the elderly couple huddled together in their summer cottage and waited”. What might be they anticipating? What might the locals understand? Each occasion I peruse this author’s chilling and influential narrative, I recall that the best horror originates in that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by a noted author

In this brief tale a pair travel to an ordinary beach community in which chimes sound continuously, a constant chiming that is annoying and inexplicable. The first very scary episode happens during the evening, when they opt to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the ocean. The beach is there, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and seawater, there are waves, but the ocean seems phantom, or another thing and worse. It is simply deeply malevolent and every time I travel to the coast after dark I recall this tale that ruined the sea at night to my mind – in a good way.

The recent spouses – the wife is youthful, he’s not – go back to their lodging and find out why the bells ring, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden meets grim ballet pandemonium. It’s an unnerving contemplation about longing and deterioration, two bodies aging together as a couple, the bond and violence and tenderness of marriage.

Not just the scariest, but perhaps among the finest concise narratives in existence, and an individual preference. I read it in Spanish, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to be released in Argentina a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer

I read this narrative beside the swimming area in France in 2020. Even with the bright weather I felt an icy feeling through me. I also felt the electricity of anticipation. I was writing a new project, and I faced a block. I wasn’t sure whether there existed a proper method to craft various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I saw that it could be done.

Released decades ago, the book is a dark flight into the thoughts of a murderer, the main character, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who slaughtered and cut apart numerous individuals in Milwaukee over a decade. Infamously, this person was consumed with producing a compliant victim who would never leave with him and attempted numerous horrific efforts to do so.

The acts the story tells are appalling, but similarly terrifying is its psychological persuasiveness. The protagonist’s terrible, shattered existence is plainly told with concise language, names redacted. The reader is immersed stuck in his mind, obliged to witness ideas and deeds that shock. The foreignness of his thinking resembles a tangible impact – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Entering this story is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from a gifted writer

In my early years, I was a somnambulist and eventually began having night terrors. On one occasion, the terror featured a nightmare where I was stuck in a box and, upon awakening, I discovered that I had ripped a piece out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That home was crumbling; when storms came the entranceway filled with water, maggots came down from the roof onto the bed, and at one time a big rodent scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

When a friend presented me with the story, I was no longer living with my parents, but the story of the house located on the coastline felt familiar to myself, nostalgic at that time. It’s a story featuring a possessed noisy, sentimental building and a young woman who consumes calcium from the cliffs. I cherished the story immensely and returned repeatedly to its pages, consistently uncovering {something