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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I discovered this narrative long ago and it has stayed with me from that moment. The titular vacationers turn out to be a couple urban dwellers, who rent the same isolated lakeside house each year. This time, in place of returning home, they choose to lengthen their stay a few more weeks – an action that appears to alarm everyone in the nearby town. All pass on a similar vague warning that no one has remained at the lake after the end of summer. Nonetheless, the Allisons insist to remain, and that is the moment things start to grow more bizarre. The person who delivers fuel declines to provide to them. No one agrees to bring food to the cottage, and at the time they attempt to go to the village, the car won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the power in the radio diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people clung to each other within their rental and waited”. What could be this couple waiting for? What could the locals know? Every time I read Jackson’s chilling and thought-provoking narrative, I’m reminded that the top terror stems from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a pair travel to an ordinary coastal village where bells ring the whole time, a constant chiming that is bothersome and puzzling. The opening truly frightening scene takes place at night, as they choose to walk around and they are unable to locate the water. Sand is present, there is the odor of rotting fish and salt, waves crash, but the sea is a ghost, or a different entity and even more alarming. It is simply insanely sinister and every time I travel to the coast at night I think about this narrative which spoiled the ocean after dark in my view – favorably.

The recent spouses – she’s very young, the man is mature – go back to the inn and find out the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of confinement, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden encounters danse macabre pandemonium. It is a disturbing meditation regarding craving and deterioration, two people growing old jointly as a couple, the connection and aggression and gentleness within wedlock.

Not just the most frightening, but likely one of the best short stories out there, and an individual preference. I experienced it in Spanish, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to appear in Argentina a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I read Zombie near the water in the French countryside a few years ago. Despite the sunshine I experienced cold creep through me. I also experienced the electricity of fascination. I was writing my third novel, and I faced a wall. I was uncertain whether there existed a proper method to compose certain terrifying elements the story includes. Going through this book, I saw that it could be done.

Published in 1995, the novel is a grim journey into the thoughts of a young serial killer, the protagonist, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who murdered and mutilated numerous individuals in a city over a decade. Notoriously, this person was consumed with making a compliant victim that would remain with him and carried out several macabre trials to accomplish it.

The deeds the novel describes are horrific, but similarly terrifying is the mental realism. The character’s awful, fragmented world is directly described using minimal words, details omitted. The reader is immersed stuck in his mind, obliged to witness thoughts and actions that horrify. The strangeness of his psyche feels like a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Going into this book is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by a gifted writer

In my early years, I was a somnambulist and later started experiencing nightmares. Once, the horror included a nightmare during which I was confined inside a container and, when I woke up, I realized that I had removed the slat from the window, trying to get out. That home was crumbling; when it rained heavily the entranceway filled with water, maggots fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and at one time a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in my sister’s room.

Once a companion gave me the story, I had moved out with my parents, but the story regarding the building perched on the cliffs appeared known to me, nostalgic as I felt. It is a story about a haunted noisy, sentimental building and a young woman who consumes chalk from the shoreline. I loved the novel immensely and returned again and again to its pages, consistently uncovering {something