🔗 Share this article

Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from a master of suspense

I encountered this tale years ago and it has stayed with me from that moment. The named “summer people” turn out to be the Allisons urban dwellers, who occupy a particular off-grid lakeside house each year. On this occasion, in place of going back home, they decide to extend their vacation an extra month – a decision that to unsettle each resident in the surrounding community. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that not a soul has ever stayed in the area past Labor Day. Even so, they are determined to remain, and at that point things start to become stranger. The individual who delivers the kerosene declines to provide for them. Nobody will deliver food to the cottage, and at the time the family try to travel to the community, their vehicle refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the batteries within the device fade, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple huddled together inside their cabin and expected”. What might be the Allisons waiting for? What could the townspeople know? Whenever I revisit Jackson’s chilling and thought-provoking story, I recall that the top terror originates in what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes from a noted author

In this short story a pair go to a common beach community in which chimes sound the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is irritating and unexplainable. The opening very scary moment takes place at night, when they opt to walk around and they can’t find the ocean. There’s sand, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and seawater, waves crash, but the sea is a ghost, or something else and even more alarming. It is simply insanely sinister and every time I travel to a beach after dark I remember this narrative that ruined the ocean after dark for me – favorably.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, he’s not – return to the hotel and find out the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, necro-orgy and demise and innocence intersects with dance of death bedlam. It is a disturbing contemplation about longing and decline, two bodies aging together as spouses, the connection and violence and gentleness within wedlock.

Not merely the most frightening, but probably one of the best short stories available, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of these tales to be published in this country several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates

I read Zombie near the water in the French countryside recently. Although it was sunny I experienced cold creep through me. I also felt the excitement of anticipation. I was working on my third novel, and I had hit an obstacle. I was uncertain if it was possible any good way to compose various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Experiencing this novel, I understood that it could be done.

Published in 1995, the novel is a grim journey through the mind of a young serial killer, Quentin P, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who murdered and mutilated 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee during a specific period. Infamously, Dahmer was obsessed with producing a compliant victim who would never leave him and carried out several horrific efforts to accomplish it.

The acts the story tells are horrific, but just as scary is its mental realism. The character’s dreadful, shattered existence is directly described in spare prose, names redacted. The reader is plunged stuck in his mind, forced to witness ideas and deeds that horrify. The alien nature of his psyche feels like a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Entering Zombie is less like reading than a full body experience. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching from a gifted writer

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and later started having night terrors. At one point, the terror included a vision during which I was trapped in a box and, when I woke up, I realized that I had removed a piece out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That home was decaying; during heavy rain the downstairs hall became inundated, fly larvae dropped from above into the bedroom, and once a big rodent ascended the window coverings in the bedroom.

Once a companion handed me this author’s book, I was no longer living at my family home, but the narrative about the home located on the coastline seemed recognizable to myself, longing at that time. It is a book featuring a possessed loud, atmospheric home and a girl who ingests calcium from the shoreline. I loved the book immensely and came back repeatedly to it, consistently uncovering {something