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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense

I encountered this tale years ago and it has lingered with me since then. The so-called vacationers are a family urban dwellers, who lease a particular remote rural cabin every summer. During this visit, instead of heading back to the city, they choose to extend their stay a few more weeks – an action that appears to unsettle each resident in the surrounding community. Each repeats the same veiled caution that no one has lingered by the water beyond the holiday. Nonetheless, they insist to not leave, and that’s when events begin to get increasingly weird. The man who brings fuel won’t sell for them. Not a single person will deliver supplies to their home, and as the family attempt to go to the village, their vehicle fails to start. A storm gathers, the batteries of their radio die, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple huddled together within their rental and anticipated”. What are the Allisons waiting for? What could the residents know? Every time I peruse Jackson’s unnerving and influential tale, I recall that the best horror stems from that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this short story a couple journey to a common beach community where bells ring continuously, a constant chiming that is irritating and inexplicable. The opening extremely terrifying moment takes place after dark, as they opt to take a walk and they fail to see the sea. The beach is there, there is the odor of decaying seafood and seawater, there are waves, but the water seems phantom, or a different entity and even more alarming. It’s just insanely sinister and every time I visit to the coast at night I remember this story that ruined the beach in the evening to my mind – favorably.

The newlyweds – she’s very young, the man is mature – go back to the inn and find out the cause of the ringing, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth meets grim ballet pandemonium. It’s a chilling meditation about longing and decline, a pair of individuals maturing in tandem as a couple, the connection and aggression and gentleness of marriage.

Not just the scariest, but perhaps one of the best brief tales available, and an individual preference. I read it in Spanish, in the first edition of these tales to be released in Argentina a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates

I read this book near the water in the French countryside in 2020. Despite the sunshine I experienced a chill over me. Additionally, I sensed the thrill of excitement. I was writing my latest book, and I had hit a block. I wasn’t sure whether there existed a proper method to write certain terrifying elements the story includes. Going through this book, I understood that it was possible.

Published in 1995, the book is a dark flight through the mind of a young serial killer, the main character, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who murdered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in the Midwest during a specific period. As is well-known, the killer was obsessed with creating a compliant victim who would never leave with him and made many macabre trials to accomplish it.

The acts the novel describes are appalling, but just as scary is its own mental realism. The character’s terrible, fragmented world is plainly told in spare prose, identities hidden. You is plunged stuck in his mind, compelled to observe thoughts and actions that horrify. The strangeness of his thinking is like a physical shock – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Going into Zombie feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

During my youth, I walked in my sleep and subsequently commenced experiencing nightmares. Once, the horror included a nightmare during which I was trapped inside a container and, as I roused, I found that I had ripped a piece off the window, attempting to escape. That home was falling apart; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall flooded, fly larvae dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and once a big rodent climbed the drapes in that space.

After an acquaintance presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living at my family home, but the story about the home located on the coastline appeared known in my view, longing as I felt. It’s a book concerning a ghostly loud, emotional house and a young woman who consumes chalk from the cliffs. I loved the book immensely and came back frequently to its pages, each time discovering {something