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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson

I discovered this tale some time back and it has lingered with me from that moment. The named vacationers are a family from the city, who lease an identical isolated rural cabin every summer. During this visit, rather than returning home, they decide to lengthen their stay an extra month – a decision that to disturb all the locals in the adjacent village. Each repeats a similar vague warning that not a soul has lingered at the lake after Labor Day. Nonetheless, the couple are determined to not leave, and at that point events begin to become stranger. The man who delivers fuel refuses to sell to the couple. Not a single person is willing to supply groceries to the cabin, and as they try to drive into town, their vehicle won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the batteries in the radio diminish, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple crowded closely within their rental and anticipated”. What might be this couple expecting? What might the townspeople understand? Every time I peruse this author’s disturbing and influential story, I remember that the top terror stems from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from a noted author

In this brief tale a couple go to a typical seaside town where church bells toll constantly, a constant chiming that is irritating and unexplainable. The first truly frightening episode takes place after dark, when they decide to take a walk and they can’t find the sea. There’s sand, there’s the smell of rotting fish and salt, surf is audible, but the water appears spectral, or a different entity and worse. It is truly profoundly ominous and each occasion I go to the coast in the evening I think about this narrative which spoiled the sea at night to my mind – positively.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, the husband is older – head back to the hotel and find out the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of confinement, gruesome festivities and demise and innocence encounters danse macabre bedlam. It’s a chilling reflection on desire and decline, a pair of individuals aging together as a couple, the attachment and brutality and gentleness within wedlock.

Not only the most frightening, but likely one of the best short stories in existence, and a personal favourite. I experienced it en español, in the first edition of this author’s works to appear in this country several years back.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this book near the water overseas recently. Although it was sunny I experienced cold creep over me. I also felt the thrill of fascination. I was working on my latest book, and I had hit a block. I wasn’t sure if there was any good way to craft some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I realized that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the book is a grim journey through the mind of a young serial killer, the protagonist, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who murdered and dismembered multiple victims in Milwaukee over a decade. As is well-known, this person was obsessed with making a compliant victim that would remain him and made many grisly attempts to do so.

The acts the novel describes are horrific, but equally frightening is its own emotional authenticity. The character’s terrible, broken reality is directly described with concise language, identities hidden. The reader is immersed trapped in his consciousness, compelled to witness mental processes and behaviors that appal. The alien nature of his thinking is like a bodily jolt – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Starting this book is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching 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 vision where I was confined inside a container and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had ripped a part out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That house was crumbling; when storms came the entranceway became inundated, insect eggs came down from the roof onto the bed, and at one time a large rat climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.

Once a companion presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living at my family home, but the story regarding the building perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable to me, longing as I felt. It’s a story about a haunted loud, atmospheric home and a young woman who consumes chalk from the cliffs. I loved the novel deeply and went back again and again to the story, each time discovering {something