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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from a master of suspense

I discovered this story some time back and it has lingered with me since then. The titular seasonal visitors happen to be a couple from the city, who occupy the same off-grid rural cabin annually. This time, rather than going back to urban life, they choose to prolong their stay for a month longer – something that seems to unsettle everyone in the adjacent village. Each repeats an identical cryptic advice that no one has remained by the water after Labor Day. Regardless, they insist to stay, and that’s when things start to become stranger. The person who supplies the kerosene won’t sell to them. No one agrees to bring groceries to the cabin, and when they endeavor to drive into town, their vehicle fails to start. A storm gathers, the batteries in the radio die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the aged individuals huddled together in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What are the Allisons expecting? What do the townspeople understand? Each occasion I revisit the writer’s chilling and influential story, I remember that the best horror originates in that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from a noted author

In this concise narrative two people journey to a common seaside town where bells ring the whole time, an incessant ringing that is irritating and inexplicable. The first truly frightening scene takes place after dark, when they opt to take a walk and they are unable to locate the water. There’s sand, there is the odor of decaying seafood and seawater, waves crash, but the sea appears spectral, or another thing and worse. It’s just profoundly ominous and whenever I visit to the shore at night I think about this tale that ruined the sea at night in my view – positively.

The young couple – she’s very young, the husband is older – head back to the hotel and learn the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and death-and-the-maiden intersects with danse macabre bedlam. It’s an unnerving reflection about longing and deterioration, two people growing old jointly as spouses, the attachment and aggression and affection of marriage.

Not just the most terrifying, but perhaps a top example of short stories out there, and a personal favourite. I read it en español, in the debut release of these tales to be published locally in 2011.

Catriona Ward

Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this book near the water in the French countryside a few years ago. Despite the sunshine I sensed a chill over me. I also experienced the electricity of anticipation. I was working on a new project, and I faced a wall. I didn’t know if there was an effective approach to craft certain terrifying elements the book contains. Reading Zombie, I realized that it could be done.

Published in 1995, the book is a dark flight into the thoughts of a criminal, Quentin P, inspired by a notorious figure, the murderer who killed and dismembered 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, the killer was obsessed with creating a submissive individual who would stay him and made many macabre trials to achieve this.

The actions the book depicts are appalling, but equally frightening is the mental realism. The character’s terrible, shattered existence is plainly told with concise language, details omitted. You is plunged caught in his thoughts, forced to witness mental processes and behaviors that appal. The strangeness of his thinking feels like a tangible impact – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Starting this book feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and eventually began having night terrors. At one point, the horror involved a dream during which I was stuck in a box and, as I roused, I found that I had torn off a part off the window, trying to get out. That home was crumbling; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall flooded, insect eggs came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and once a large rat scaled the curtains in that space.

After an acquaintance gave me the story, I was no longer living in my childhood residence, but the narrative about the home high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar in my view, homesick as I was. It’s a book featuring a possessed loud, sentimental building and a girl who eats calcium from the cliffs. I loved the novel deeply and came back again and again to its pages, always finding {something