🔗 Share this article

Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I discovered this tale years ago and it has lingered with me since then. The so-called “summer people” happen to be the Allisons from New York, who lease a particular isolated rural cabin annually. This time, instead of heading back home, they choose to extend their stay an extra month – something that seems to disturb everyone in the nearby town. Each repeats the same veiled caution that not a soul has ever stayed at the lake beyond the end of summer. Regardless, they are resolved to stay, and that’s when things start to get increasingly weird. The man who brings fuel declines to provide for them. Nobody will deliver food to the cabin, and when they endeavor to go to the village, their vehicle won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the energy of their radio die, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple huddled together inside their cabin and anticipated”. What might be they anticipating? What could the townspeople know? Each occasion I read Jackson’s unnerving and thought-provoking tale, I remember that the best horror comes from that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this short story a couple journey to a common seaside town where church bells toll continuously, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and inexplicable. The initial extremely terrifying episode happens after dark, as they decide to take a walk and they fail to see the sea. Sand is present, the scent exists of putrid marine life and salt, surf is audible, but the ocean seems phantom, or a different entity and more dreadful. It’s just profoundly ominous and every time I visit to the shore at night I remember this story that ruined the ocean after dark for me – in a good way.

The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – head back to their lodging and learn the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and demise and innocence intersects with danse macabre bedlam. It’s an unnerving contemplation on desire and decay, two people aging together as partners, the bond and brutality and gentleness of marriage.

Not merely the most terrifying, but probably among the finest concise narratives in existence, and a beloved choice. I read it in Spanish, in the debut release of Aickman stories to be published in Argentina several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I perused Zombie near the water in the French countryside in 2020. Although it was sunny I experienced an icy feeling within me. I also experienced the excitement of excitement. I was working on my third novel, and I encountered an obstacle. I didn’t know if it was possible any good way to write some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Going through this book, I realized that there was a way.

Published in 1995, the book is a grim journey within the psyche of a young serial killer, the main character, based on a notorious figure, the murderer who killed and cut apart multiple victims in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, this person was fixated with making a submissive individual who would stay with him and attempted numerous macabre trials to do so.

The acts the book depicts are appalling, but similarly terrifying is its own psychological persuasiveness. The protagonist’s dreadful, broken reality is plainly told in spare prose, identities hidden. The reader is immersed stuck in his mind, forced to witness ideas and deeds that horrify. The strangeness of his mind resembles a tangible impact – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Entering this story is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and later started suffering from bad dreams. Once, the terror involved a nightmare in which I was confined inside a container and, when I woke up, I found that I had torn off a part from the window, attempting to escape. That house was falling apart; when storms came the entranceway filled with water, insect eggs dropped from above onto the bed, and on one occasion a big rodent climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.

After an acquaintance gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living in my childhood residence, but the tale of the house high on the Dover cliffs appeared known to me, longing as I felt. It’s a story concerning a ghostly loud, emotional house and a female character who eats limestone from the shoreline. I cherished the novel deeply and returned repeatedly to the story, each time discovering {something