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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I encountered this narrative long ago and it has lingered with me ever since. The so-called seasonal visitors are a family from the city, who rent the same remote country cottage every summer. On this occasion, instead of returning home, they decide to lengthen their vacation a few more weeks – an action that appears to disturb each resident in the nearby town. Each repeats an identical cryptic advice that nobody has ever stayed by the water beyond Labor Day. Even so, the couple are determined to not leave, and that is the moment events begin to get increasingly weird. The man who delivers the kerosene declines to provide to the couple. Not a single person will deliver food to the cottage, and when the Allisons endeavor to travel to the community, the automobile won’t start. A tempest builds, the batteries in the radio die, and as darkness falls, “the two old people crowded closely inside their cabin and expected”. What could be they expecting? What could the locals understand? Each occasion I read Jackson’s disturbing and inspiring story, I’m reminded that the best horror comes from that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this short story a couple go to a typical beach community in which chimes sound constantly, a constant chiming that is irritating and unexplainable. The opening very scary episode takes place after dark, when they decide to take a walk and they are unable to locate the water. The beach is there, there is the odor of rotting fish and salt, surf is audible, but the sea is a ghost, or a different entity and more dreadful. It’s just insanely sinister and every time I travel to the coast in the evening I remember this story which spoiled the ocean after dark to my mind – in a good way.

The young couple – the woman is adolescent, he’s not – return to the inn and learn the cause of the ringing, during a prolonged scene of confinement, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden intersects with grim ballet bedlam. It’s an unnerving meditation regarding craving and deterioration, two people aging together as spouses, the bond and violence and gentleness within wedlock.

Not just the most frightening, but perhaps one of the best brief tales available, and an individual preference. I encountered it in Spanish, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to be published in this country a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I read this narrative near the water in the French countryside a few years ago. Despite the sunshine I felt an icy feeling through me. I also experienced the electricity of anticipation. I was working on my third novel, and I faced a block. I didn’t know whether there existed an effective approach to compose certain terrifying elements the story includes. Going through this book, I realized that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a grim journey through the mind of a criminal, the protagonist, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who slaughtered and cut apart numerous individuals in a city between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, this person was fixated with creating a submissive individual that would remain with him and made many horrific efforts to do so.

The deeds the novel describes are terrible, but equally frightening is its psychological persuasiveness. The character’s terrible, fragmented world is directly described with concise language, details omitted. You is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, forced to observe ideas and deeds that appal. The foreignness of his mind feels like a bodily jolt – or being stranded in an empty realm. Entering Zombie is not just reading than a full body experience. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

During my youth, I walked in my sleep and later started suffering from bad dreams. Once, the terror included a nightmare where I was trapped in a box and, as I roused, I realized that I had removed a part out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That house was crumbling; during heavy rain the ground floor corridor filled with water, fly larvae came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and once a sizeable vermin climbed the drapes in the bedroom.

Once a companion gave me the story, I was no longer living at my family home, but the tale regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to myself, homesick at that time. This is a book about a haunted noisy, emotional house and a young woman who ingests limestone from the cliffs. I adored the book deeply and came back again and again to the story, each time discovering {something