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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense

I encountered this tale long ago and it has stayed with me ever since. The named seasonal visitors turn out to be a couple from the city, who rent the same remote rural cabin annually. On this occasion, rather than heading back to the city, they choose to extend their stay a few more weeks – a decision that to unsettle each resident in the nearby town. Each repeats the same veiled caution that no one has lingered in the area after the holiday. Even so, the couple are resolved to not leave, and that’s when events begin to grow more bizarre. The man who delivers fuel refuses to sell to the couple. Not a single person is willing to supply food to the cabin, and as the family attempt to travel to the community, the automobile refuses to operate. A storm gathers, the batteries of their radio fade, and when night comes, “the two old people crowded closely in their summer cottage and waited”. What might be they waiting for? What do the residents know? Every time I revisit Jackson’s chilling and inspiring story, I’m reminded that the best horror originates in that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative two people go to an ordinary beach community in which chimes sound continuously, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and unexplainable. The opening extremely terrifying moment occurs at night, when they choose to go for a stroll and they can’t find the sea. Sand is present, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and brine, waves crash, but the ocean appears spectral, or another thing and worse. It is truly profoundly ominous and whenever I go to the shore in the evening I think about this narrative which spoiled the ocean after dark to my mind – favorably.

The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, he’s not – return to their lodging and discover the cause of the ringing, during a prolonged scene of confinement, gruesome festivities and death-and-the-maiden meets dance of death bedlam. It’s a chilling reflection on desire and deterioration, two people growing old jointly as a couple, the bond and aggression and tenderness within wedlock.

Not just the scariest, but likely one of the best brief tales in existence, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in Spanish, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to be released in this country several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I read this narrative beside the swimming area overseas recently. Even with the bright weather I felt a chill within me. I also experienced the excitement of excitement. I was working on a new project, and I had hit an obstacle. I was uncertain if there was a proper method to compose certain terrifying elements the book contains. Experiencing this novel, I realized that there was a way.

Released decades ago, the novel is a grim journey into the thoughts of a criminal, the protagonist, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who killed and mutilated multiple victims in the Midwest over a decade. As is well-known, this person was obsessed with making a zombie sex slave who would never leave with him and carried out several grisly attempts to accomplish it.

The deeds the novel describes are horrific, but just as scary is its own emotional authenticity. Quentin P’s awful, fragmented world is simply narrated in spare prose, names redacted. You is plunged trapped in his consciousness, forced to observe ideas and deeds that appal. The alien nature of his mind resembles a bodily jolt – or being stranded in an empty realm. Entering this story is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and later started suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the horror involved a dream in which I was trapped inside a container and, upon awakening, I realized that I had torn off a part from the window, seeking to leave. That building was falling apart; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall filled with water, fly larvae dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in the bedroom.

After an acquaintance presented me with this author’s book, I was residing elsewhere in my childhood residence, but the story of the house high on the Dover cliffs appeared known in my view, homesick at that time. It is a novel about a haunted noisy, sentimental building and a female character who ingests calcium off the rocks. I cherished the book deeply and returned again and again to its pages, always finding {something