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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I discovered this narrative years ago and it has lingered with me ever since. The named seasonal visitors are the Allisons from New York, who lease the same remote country cottage every summer. During this visit, instead of heading back home, they choose to extend their vacation for a month longer – a decision that to unsettle each resident in the adjacent village. All pass on a similar vague warning that no one has lingered in the area after the end of summer. Even so, they insist to remain, and at that point events begin to get increasingly weird. The person who brings fuel won’t sell to the couple. Not a single person is willing to supply groceries to the cabin, and when they try to go to the village, their vehicle fails to start. A tempest builds, the power in the radio fade, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals huddled together within their rental and waited”. What could be they expecting? What might the locals be aware of? Every time I peruse the writer’s unnerving and thought-provoking story, I recall that the best horror stems from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this short story a pair go to a typical coastal village where bells ring the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and unexplainable. The opening extremely terrifying episode happens after dark, when they decide to walk around and they fail to see the sea. The beach is there, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and brine, waves crash, but the water seems phantom, or something else and even more alarming. It is simply insanely sinister and whenever I visit to a beach at night I remember this narrative that ruined the beach in the evening in my view – in a good way.

The young couple – she’s very young, the husband is older – return to the inn and discover why the bells ring, during a prolonged scene of enclosed spaces, necro-orgy and death-and-the-maiden intersects with dance of death bedlam. It is a disturbing reflection regarding craving and decay, two bodies aging together as partners, the bond and brutality and tenderness within wedlock.

Not merely the scariest, but perhaps one of the best short stories in existence, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in Spanish, in the first edition of Aickman stories to appear locally in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this book by a pool in the French countryside a few years ago. Despite the sunshine I felt cold creep through me. Additionally, I sensed the thrill of anticipation. I was working on a new project, and I had hit a wall. I wasn’t sure whether there existed a proper method to compose some of the fearful things the story includes. Reading Zombie, I understood that it was possible.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a bleak exploration through the mind of a criminal, Quentin P, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who killed and mutilated numerous individuals in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, the killer was obsessed with producing a compliant victim that would remain by his side and made many horrific efforts to do so.

The actions the story tells are terrible, but similarly terrifying is its mental realism. Quentin P’s dreadful, shattered existence is directly described using minimal words, names redacted. The audience is sunk deep stuck in his mind, obliged to witness mental processes and behaviors that shock. The strangeness of his thinking is like a physical shock – or being stranded in an empty realm. Entering this book feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced having night terrors. At one point, the horror included a dream during which I was trapped in a box and, as I roused, I found that I had ripped a part from the window, trying to get out. That home was falling apart; during heavy rain the ground floor corridor filled with water, fly larvae fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and at one time a large rat scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

When a friend gave me the story, I had moved out at my family home, but the story about the home perched on the cliffs appeared known in my view, homesick as I felt. It’s a novel featuring a possessed loud, sentimental building and a female character who consumes chalk off the rocks. I adored the book so much and came back again and again to the story, each time discovering {something