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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by a master of suspense

I read this tale some time back and it has haunted me since then. The titular seasonal visitors turn out to be a couple from the city, who rent an identical remote country cottage every summer. This time, in place of going back home, they choose to lengthen their holiday for a month longer – something that seems to disturb all the locals in the adjacent village. Each repeats a similar vague warning that not a soul has lingered by the water past the holiday. Even so, they insist to remain, and that is the moment things start to get increasingly weird. The person who brings the kerosene declines to provide to the couple. No one is willing to supply groceries to the cottage, and as the family endeavor to travel to the community, the automobile fails to start. A tempest builds, the batteries in the radio diminish, and as darkness falls, “the two old people crowded closely within their rental and waited”. What are this couple expecting? What could the townspeople know? Every time I read the writer’s unnerving and influential tale, I’m reminded that the finest fright comes from that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a couple journey to an ordinary coastal village where church bells toll the whole time, an incessant ringing that is annoying and puzzling. The first very scary episode happens at night, when they choose to walk around and they are unable to locate the ocean. Sand is present, there’s the smell of rotting fish and brine, waves crash, but the sea is a ghost, or a different entity and worse. It is simply insanely sinister and each occasion I travel to the coast at night I recall this story that ruined the beach in the evening to my mind – positively.

The recent spouses – the wife is youthful, the husband is older – return to the inn and discover the reason for the chiming, during a prolonged scene of confinement, necro-orgy and mortality and youth encounters grim ballet pandemonium. It’s an unnerving meditation on desire and deterioration, two people growing old jointly as a couple, the connection and aggression and tenderness in matrimony.

Not only the most terrifying, but perhaps a top example of brief tales in existence, and an individual preference. I experienced it en español, in the first edition of Aickman stories to be released locally a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I read Zombie by a pool in France a few years ago. Although it was sunny I experienced an icy feeling within me. I also experienced the thrill of excitement. I was writing my latest book, and I encountered an obstacle. I didn’t know if there was any good way to write certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Going through this book, I saw that there was a way.

Published in 1995, the book is a bleak exploration into the thoughts of a criminal, Quentin P, inspired by a notorious figure, the criminal who murdered and cut apart multiple victims in Milwaukee during a specific period. Infamously, Dahmer was obsessed with producing a compliant victim that would remain by his side and carried out several horrific efforts to accomplish it.

The actions the book depicts are horrific, but equally frightening is its emotional authenticity. Quentin P’s terrible, fragmented world is plainly told in spare prose, names redacted. The reader is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, compelled to witness ideas and deeds that horrify. The alien nature of his psyche feels like a bodily jolt – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Going into this story is not just reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I was a somnambulist and eventually began having night terrors. On one occasion, the horror featured a nightmare where I was stuck in a box and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had removed the slat out of the window frame, trying to get out. That building was decaying; during heavy rain the entranceway flooded, maggots came down from the roof onto the bed, and at one time a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in my sister’s room.

After an acquaintance handed me the story, I had moved out at my family home, but the story of the house high on the Dover cliffs appeared known to me, homesick at that time. This is a book concerning a ghostly clamorous, sentimental building and a girl who eats limestone from the shoreline. I adored the book immensely and went back repeatedly to it, consistently uncovering {something