🔗 Share this article

Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I read this narrative years ago and it has lingered with me from that moment. The named “summer people” happen to be a family from the city, who occupy an identical off-grid lakeside house each year. On this occasion, instead of heading back to urban life, they opt to lengthen their stay for a month longer – an action that appears to alarm each resident in the adjacent village. All pass on a similar vague warning that not a soul has ever stayed at the lake after the holiday. Even so, the couple insist to stay, and at that point situations commence to grow more bizarre. The individual who supplies oil won’t sell for them. Nobody will deliver food to the cabin, and as the family try to drive into town, the car won’t start. A tempest builds, the batteries within the device die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple crowded closely inside their cabin and waited”. What are they anticipating? What could the townspeople understand? Whenever I read this author’s unnerving and influential tale, I remember that the best horror stems from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative two people journey to an ordinary beach community where church bells toll constantly, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and puzzling. The opening very scary scene takes place during the evening, as they choose to take a walk and they fail to see the ocean. The beach is there, there’s the smell of rotting fish and brine, surf is audible, but the water appears spectral, or a different entity and more dreadful. It is truly insanely sinister and every time I travel to the shore in the evening I recall this narrative which spoiled the ocean after dark in my view – in a good way.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, he’s not – head back to the inn and discover the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and demise and innocence meets dance of death chaos. It’s a chilling reflection about longing and decay, two bodies aging together as a couple, the connection and violence and tenderness within wedlock.

Not merely the most frightening, but probably among the finest short stories in existence, and a beloved choice. I encountered it en español, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to appear in Argentina several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from an esteemed writer

I delved into this book beside the swimming area in France in 2020. Despite the sunshine I felt cold creep over me. I also felt the electricity of excitement. I was composing my latest book, and I had hit a wall. I was uncertain if there was a proper method to write certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I realized that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a grim journey through the mind of a murderer, Quentin P, based on an infamous individual, the criminal who killed and cut apart multiple victims in a city over a decade. Notoriously, this person was consumed with making a submissive individual who would stay by his side and carried out several horrific efforts to accomplish it.

The actions the book depicts are horrific, but equally frightening is its mental realism. The protagonist’s dreadful, shattered existence is simply narrated with concise language, names redacted. The reader is plunged trapped in his consciousness, obliged to see ideas and deeds that horrify. The foreignness of his psyche is like a tangible impact – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Starting Zombie is not just reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and later started having night terrors. On one occasion, the fear featured a nightmare in which I was confined in a box and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had removed a part out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That home was decaying; when storms came the ground floor corridor became inundated, fly larvae came down from the roof onto the bed, and once a big rodent climbed the drapes in the bedroom.

When a friend handed me this author’s book, I was no longer living at my family home, but the narrative of the house high on the Dover cliffs appeared known to myself, longing as I was. It’s a story concerning a ghostly noisy, sentimental building and a girl who consumes limestone from the shoreline. I cherished the book so much and came back frequently to the story, each time discovering {something