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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I read this tale years ago and it has stayed with me from that moment. The so-called seasonal visitors are a couple from the city, who occupy a particular remote lakeside house each year. This time, in place of heading back to the city, they choose to lengthen their stay for a month longer – an action that appears to disturb all the locals in the nearby town. Each repeats the same veiled caution that not a soul has remained by the water after the end of summer. Regardless, the Allisons are determined to stay, and that’s when situations commence to become stranger. The man who supplies oil refuses to sell to the couple. Nobody agrees to bring groceries to the cottage, and when the family endeavor to go to the village, the car won’t start. A storm gathers, the energy of their radio die, and when night comes, “the two old people crowded closely in their summer cottage and waited”. What might be the Allisons expecting? What could the residents know? Every time I revisit Jackson’s chilling and thought-provoking tale, I remember that the top terror stems from the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes from a noted author

In this brief tale a pair travel to an ordinary beach community in which chimes sound constantly, an incessant ringing that is irritating and inexplicable. The opening very scary moment occurs at night, when they opt to walk around and they are unable to locate the water. Sand is present, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and salt, there are waves, but the ocean is a ghost, or something else and even more alarming. It is truly insanely sinister and whenever I travel to the shore after dark I recall this story which spoiled the beach in the evening to my mind – favorably.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – head back to the inn and discover why the bells ring, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and demise and innocence meets dance of death bedlam. It is a disturbing reflection on desire and decline, two bodies aging together as a couple, the attachment and aggression and gentleness of marriage.

Not just the most terrifying, but likely one of the best brief tales out there, and a beloved choice. I read it in Spanish, in the first edition of these tales to be published in Argentina in 2011.

Catriona Ward

Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this book by a pool in France a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I felt cold creep over me. I also felt the electricity of excitement. I was working on a new project, and I had hit a wall. I didn’t know whether there existed any good way to craft various frightening aspects the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I understood that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a grim journey within the psyche of a criminal, the main character, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who slaughtered and dismembered numerous individuals in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, this person was fixated with producing a compliant victim who would stay by his side and attempted numerous grisly attempts to achieve this.

The actions the book depicts are terrible, but similarly terrifying is its own psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s awful, broken reality is simply narrated in spare prose, details omitted. The reader is immersed caught in his thoughts, compelled to see thoughts and actions that shock. The alien nature of his psyche resembles a tangible impact – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Entering this book feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I sleepwalked and eventually began having night terrors. Once, the terror involved a nightmare where I was confined in a box and, upon awakening, I discovered that I had ripped the slat out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That house was decaying; during heavy rain the ground floor corridor filled with water, fly larvae dropped from above onto the bed, and at one time a large rat scaled the curtains in that space.

Once a companion handed me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the tale about the home located on the coastline felt familiar to me, nostalgic as I felt. It’s a novel about a haunted clamorous, emotional house and a girl who consumes limestone from the shoreline. I cherished the story so much and came back repeatedly to it, each time discovering {something