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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I encountered this story some time back and it has lingered with me ever since. The named “summer people” turn out to be a family urban dwellers, who lease the same off-grid lakeside house each year. On this occasion, in place of returning to urban life, they opt to prolong their stay an extra month – a decision that to unsettle each resident in the surrounding community. All pass on an identical cryptic advice that not a soul has lingered at the lake beyond the end of summer. Regardless, the Allisons are resolved to remain, and at that point events begin to become stranger. The individual who brings oil refuses to sell to the couple. Not a single person will deliver groceries to the cottage, and as the family attempt to travel to the community, their vehicle won’t start. A tempest builds, the energy within the device fade, and when night comes, “the two old people clung to each other in their summer cottage and expected”. What could be this couple waiting for? What do the residents know? Whenever I revisit this author’s chilling and thought-provoking story, I remember that the top terror comes from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by a noted author

In this short story a couple go to an ordinary seaside town where church bells toll constantly, a perpetual pealing that is irritating and inexplicable. The first truly frightening scene occurs at night, as they opt to take a walk and they are unable to locate the water. Sand is present, there is the odor of rotting fish and brine, there are waves, but the sea seems phantom, or a different entity and even more alarming. It is truly insanely sinister and each occasion I visit to the shore at night I think about this narrative that destroyed the sea at night in my view – positively.

The young couple – the woman is adolescent, he’s not – return to their lodging and discover the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth intersects with grim ballet pandemonium. It is a disturbing reflection on desire and decay, a pair of individuals aging together as partners, the connection and aggression and gentleness of marriage.

Not only the scariest, but probably a top example of concise narratives out there, and a personal favourite. I read it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of Aickman stories to be published locally in 2011.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates

I read Zombie near the water in the French countryside a few years ago. Despite the sunshine I felt a chill over me. I also experienced the electricity of anticipation. I was composing a new project, and I had hit a wall. I wasn’t sure if it was possible a proper method to craft some of the fearful things the narrative involves. 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 protagonist, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who killed and mutilated 17 young men and boys in the Midwest during a specific period. Infamously, the killer was consumed with making a compliant victim that would remain with him and carried out several grisly attempts to achieve this.

The actions the story tells are appalling, but equally frightening is its own mental realism. The character’s awful, fragmented world is directly described in spare prose, identities hidden. The audience is immersed caught in his thoughts, obliged to see ideas and deeds that shock. The strangeness of his mind feels like a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Entering this story is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching from a gifted writer

When I was a child, I sleepwalked and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. Once, the horror featured a nightmare during which I was confined in a box and, upon awakening, I found that I had removed a piece off the window, attempting to escape. That home was crumbling; during heavy rain the ground floor corridor flooded, fly larvae came down from the roof into the bedroom, and once a big rodent climbed the drapes in that space.

After an acquaintance presented me with the story, I was no longer living at my family home, but the story regarding the building located on the coastline seemed recognizable in my view, nostalgic as I was. It’s a story featuring a possessed clamorous, emotional house and a young woman who ingests limestone from the cliffs. I cherished the story immensely and returned frequently to the story, each time discovering {something