🔗 Share this article

Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from a master of suspense

I read this story years ago and it has haunted me since then. The titular seasonal visitors happen to be the Allisons urban dwellers, who occupy a particular isolated country cottage every summer. On this occasion, in place of going back to the city, they choose to extend their stay for a month longer – a decision that to disturb all the locals in the nearby town. Each repeats a similar vague warning that no one has lingered by the water beyond the end of summer. Regardless, the Allisons are determined to not leave, and at that point things start to grow more bizarre. The person who delivers fuel won’t sell to the couple. No one will deliver food to the cottage, and when the family endeavor to travel to the community, the automobile refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the power of their radio die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple crowded closely in their summer cottage and waited”. What could be this couple waiting for? What could the townspeople be aware of? Each occasion I revisit Jackson’s chilling and influential narrative, I remember that the finest fright originates in what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman

In this brief tale two people travel to a common seaside town in which chimes sound the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is annoying and puzzling. The first extremely terrifying episode occurs after dark, when they choose to take a walk and they can’t find the sea. The beach is there, there’s the smell of rotting fish and seawater, surf is audible, but the sea is a ghost, or something else and worse. It is truly profoundly ominous and every time I travel to the shore at night I recall this narrative that destroyed the sea at night in my view – favorably.

The newlyweds – she’s very young, he’s not – go back to the inn and discover why the bells ring, in a long sequence of confinement, gruesome festivities and demise and innocence encounters danse macabre pandemonium. It is a disturbing reflection regarding craving and decay, two people maturing in tandem as spouses, the bond and brutality and affection in matrimony.

Not merely the most terrifying, but perhaps among the finest brief tales available, and a beloved choice. I read it en español, in the initial publication of these tales to be released locally several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from an esteemed writer

I delved into this narrative by a pool in France a few years ago. Although it was sunny I felt an icy feeling over me. I also felt the thrill of excitement. I was working on my latest book, and I had hit a block. I didn’t know if it was possible any good way to compose certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Going through this book, I saw that there was a way.

Released decades ago, the novel is a grim journey within the psyche of a murderer, the protagonist, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who killed and mutilated multiple victims in Milwaukee over a decade. Notoriously, the killer was consumed with creating a compliant victim who would never leave by his side and made many horrific efforts to do so.

The actions the book depicts are appalling, but similarly terrifying is its own emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s awful, broken reality is simply narrated using minimal words, names redacted. The audience is immersed stuck in his mind, obliged to see mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The foreignness of his mind feels like a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Starting this book feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from a gifted writer

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and later started suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the horror involved a dream in which I was confined in a box and, when I woke up, I realized that I had removed a part out of the window frame, attempting to escape. That building was falling apart; when storms came the ground floor corridor flooded, fly larvae came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and once a large rat scaled the curtains in that space.

After an acquaintance handed me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living at my family home, but the tale about the home high on the Dover cliffs appeared known to me, nostalgic as I was. It is a book concerning a ghostly clamorous, sentimental building and a female character who consumes chalk from the cliffs. I cherished the novel deeply and returned repeatedly to its pages, consistently uncovering {something