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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I encountered this tale long ago and it has lingered with me since then. The so-called seasonal visitors turn out to be a family from New York, who rent a particular off-grid country cottage each year. During this visit, rather than returning to the city, they decide to extend their holiday a few more weeks – an action that appears to unsettle each resident in the nearby town. Each repeats the same veiled caution that nobody has lingered at the lake beyond the end of summer. Nonetheless, the Allisons are determined to stay, and that’s when situations commence to become stranger. The individual who delivers the kerosene won’t sell to them. Not a single person is willing to supply groceries to the cottage, and at the time they attempt to drive into town, the automobile fails to start. Bad weather approaches, the energy of their radio fade, and when night comes, “the two old people clung to each other within their rental and waited”. What could be they anticipating? What do the residents understand? Whenever I revisit Jackson’s unnerving and thought-provoking tale, I remember that the top terror comes from what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this short story two people travel to a common coastal village where bells ring constantly, an incessant ringing that is annoying and unexplainable. The opening very scary episode happens after dark, as they decide to walk around and they can’t find the water. The beach is there, there is the odor of decaying seafood and brine, waves crash, but the water appears spectral, or something else and more dreadful. It is simply insanely sinister and whenever I go to a beach in the evening I think about this story that ruined the ocean after dark in my view – in a good way.

The young couple – she’s very young, the husband is older – head back to their lodging and learn the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, necro-orgy and demise and innocence encounters danse macabre bedlam. It is a disturbing contemplation regarding craving and decay, two bodies aging together as spouses, the attachment and brutality and affection within wedlock.

Not only the most terrifying, but perhaps a top example of short stories in existence, and a beloved choice. I encountered it in Spanish, in the first edition of this author’s works to appear in Argentina in 2011.

Catriona Ward

Zombie from an esteemed writer

I delved into this book near the water overseas recently. Although it was sunny I felt cold creep through me. I also experienced the electricity of fascination. I was writing my third novel, and I encountered an obstacle. I was uncertain if there was a proper method to write certain terrifying elements the book contains. Reading Zombie, I understood that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a grim journey through the mind of a young serial killer, the main character, modeled after a notorious figure, the serial killer who murdered and mutilated 17 young men and boys in the Midwest during a specific period. As is well-known, the killer was consumed with making a zombie sex slave who would stay by his side and carried out several horrific efforts to do so.

The acts the story tells are horrific, but just as scary is the emotional authenticity. The character’s dreadful, broken reality is plainly told using minimal words, details omitted. The audience is plunged stuck in his mind, obliged to observe thoughts and actions that appal. The alien nature of his thinking resembles a tangible impact – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Entering Zombie is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and eventually began having night terrors. At one point, the fear featured a vision where I was stuck inside a container and, upon awakening, I found that I had ripped a piece off the window, attempting to escape. That building was crumbling; during heavy rain the entranceway filled with water, maggots came down from the roof onto the bed, and on one occasion a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

After an acquaintance gave me this author’s book, I was residing elsewhere at my family home, but the story regarding the building perched on the cliffs appeared known to me, homesick at that time. It’s a novel concerning a ghostly loud, atmospheric home and a young woman who eats calcium from the shoreline. I adored the book deeply and returned repeatedly to the story, each time discovering {something