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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I discovered this tale years ago and it has lingered with me since then. The titular “summer people” are the Allisons urban dwellers, who occupy an identical isolated rural cabin each year. During this visit, instead of heading back to the city, they decide to extend their holiday an extra month – an action that appears to unsettle all the locals in the adjacent village. All pass on a similar vague warning that not a soul has remained in the area past the end of summer. Regardless, the Allisons insist to not leave, and that’s when things start to get increasingly weird. The man who brings fuel won’t sell to the couple. No one is willing to supply groceries to the cabin, and as the Allisons attempt to drive into town, the automobile won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the batteries within the device die, and as darkness falls, “the two old people huddled together within their rental and expected”. What might be the Allisons waiting for? What might the locals understand? Every time I read this author’s disturbing and thought-provoking narrative, I’m reminded that the finest fright comes from that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes by a noted author

In this short story a pair go to an ordinary coastal village where bells ring continuously, a constant chiming that is irritating and puzzling. The first truly frightening moment happens during the evening, as they opt to walk around and they can’t find the ocean. The beach is there, the scent exists of putrid marine life and seawater, surf is audible, but the water seems phantom, or something else and even more alarming. It is simply profoundly ominous and each occasion I go to the coast at night I remember this narrative which spoiled the ocean after dark for me – in a good way.

The newlyweds – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – return to their lodging and find out why the bells ring, through an extended episode of confinement, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth encounters danse macabre bedlam. It is a disturbing meditation about longing and decline, two people maturing in tandem as spouses, the attachment and violence and tenderness within wedlock.

Not just the most terrifying, but probably among the finest concise narratives in existence, and a personal favourite. I read it in Spanish, in the debut release of these tales to be published in this country in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates

I perused Zombie by a pool in the French countryside recently. Despite the sunshine I sensed cold creep over me. Additionally, I sensed the excitement of anticipation. I was writing a new project, and I had hit a block. I was uncertain if it was possible a proper method to compose some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Experiencing this novel, I understood that it could be done.

Published in 1995, the novel is a grim journey into the thoughts of a young serial killer, the protagonist, modeled after an infamous individual, the criminal who killed and dismembered multiple victims in the Midwest over a decade. Infamously, Dahmer was consumed with creating a zombie sex slave that would remain by his side and carried out several grisly attempts to achieve this.

The deeds the book depicts are appalling, but similarly terrifying is its psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s terrible, shattered existence is simply narrated in spare prose, names redacted. The reader is immersed caught in his thoughts, forced to witness ideas and deeds that shock. The alien nature of his thinking feels like a bodily jolt – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Starting this story is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced having night terrors. Once, the horror involved a vision where I was trapped within an enclosure and, as I roused, I found that I had torn off a piece out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That building was decaying; when it rained heavily the ground floor corridor flooded, insect eggs came down from the roof onto the bed, and at one time a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in my sister’s room.

Once a companion presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out in my childhood residence, but the story about the home high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable in my view, homesick as I was. This is a book about a haunted noisy, atmospheric home and a female character who consumes limestone from the cliffs. I adored the novel deeply and went back repeatedly to the story, consistently uncovering {something