🔗 Share this article

Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I discovered this tale years ago and it has lingered with me from that moment. The titular seasonal visitors are a couple from the city, who rent an identical remote country cottage each year. This time, instead of returning home, they choose to lengthen their stay for a month longer – a decision that to unsettle each resident in the nearby town. Each repeats a similar vague warning that not a soul has remained in the area after the end of summer. Nonetheless, the Allisons are resolved to stay, and that is the moment situations commence to get increasingly weird. The person who brings oil declines to provide to the couple. No one agrees to bring groceries to the cottage, and when the Allisons attempt to drive into town, the automobile fails to start. A storm gathers, the batteries within the device fade, and with the arrival of dusk, “the aged individuals clung to each other within their rental and expected”. What could be the Allisons waiting for? What do the townspeople understand? Each occasion I peruse this author’s disturbing and inspiring tale, I’m reminded that the finest fright comes from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a pair journey to an ordinary seaside town where bells ring constantly, an incessant ringing that is irritating and inexplicable. The initial extremely terrifying moment takes place after dark, at the time they choose to go for a stroll and they fail to see the sea. There’s sand, there is the odor of putrid marine life and brine, waves crash, but the ocean seems phantom, or another thing and even more alarming. It’s just insanely sinister and whenever I travel to the coast after dark I think about this tale which spoiled the beach in the evening to my mind – positively.

The newlyweds – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – return to the inn and learn the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of confinement, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth meets danse macabre pandemonium. It’s an unnerving reflection on desire and decay, two people growing old jointly as spouses, the connection and brutality and tenderness within wedlock.

Not just the scariest, but probably a top example of brief tales available, and an individual preference. I experienced it en español, in the debut release of this author’s works to be released in Argentina a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I delved into this narrative beside the swimming area overseas recently. Even with the bright weather I sensed a chill through me. I also experienced the electricity of fascination. I was writing my latest book, and I faced an obstacle. I didn’t know whether there existed a proper method to craft certain terrifying elements the book contains. Experiencing this novel, I realized that there was a way.

Published in 1995, the book is a bleak exploration into the thoughts of a young serial killer, the main character, based on a notorious figure, the murderer who killed and cut apart 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, Dahmer was obsessed with producing a zombie sex slave who would stay by his side and made many macabre trials to achieve this.

The actions the story tells are terrible, but just as scary is its own mental realism. The character’s terrible, broken reality is directly described in spare prose, names redacted. The audience is plunged trapped in his consciousness, forced to observe ideas and deeds that horrify. The foreignness of his psyche feels like a physical shock – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Going into Zombie is less like reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I walked in my sleep and eventually began experiencing nightmares. Once, the horror involved a vision where I was stuck in a box and, upon awakening, I found that I had torn off a piece out of the window frame, trying to get out. That house was crumbling; when storms came the ground floor corridor flooded, insect eggs came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and at one time a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in the bedroom.

When a friend presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out with my parents, but the story about the home perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable in my view, longing at that time. It is a book concerning a ghostly loud, emotional house and a young woman who eats limestone off the rocks. I adored the book immensely and went back repeatedly to its pages, always finding {something