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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I encountered this narrative long ago and it has stayed with me from that moment. The titular seasonal visitors turn out to be a family urban dwellers, who occupy the same isolated country cottage annually. This time, instead of heading back to urban life, they decide to extend their stay an extra month – an action that appears to alarm all the locals in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that not a soul has remained in the area after the holiday. Nonetheless, the Allisons are determined to not leave, and that’s when situations commence to grow more bizarre. The person who brings fuel refuses to sell to the couple. No one agrees to bring food to their home, and when the family try to go to the village, the car won’t start. A tempest builds, the batteries within the device diminish, and when night comes, “the two old people huddled together inside their cabin and waited”. What are this couple expecting? What do the townspeople be aware of? Every time I peruse Jackson’s unnerving and inspiring narrative, I’m reminded that the best horror originates in that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this brief tale two people go to a common coastal village where church bells toll continuously, a constant chiming that is annoying and puzzling. The first truly frightening moment takes place after dark, when they decide to walk around and they are unable to locate the sea. The beach is there, there is the odor of putrid marine life and seawater, waves crash, but the ocean is a ghost, or something else and worse. It is simply insanely sinister and each occasion I travel to a beach at night I remember this story which spoiled the sea at night to my mind – in a good way.

The recent spouses – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – head back to the inn and find out the reason for the chiming, during a prolonged scene of enclosed spaces, necro-orgy and death-and-the-maiden encounters dance of death chaos. It’s a chilling reflection about longing and decay, two bodies growing old jointly as a couple, the bond and brutality and affection of marriage.

Not just the most frightening, but likely among the finest brief tales out there, and an individual preference. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of these tales to be released in Argentina in 2011.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I delved into Zombie near the water in the French countryside a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I experienced an icy feeling through me. Additionally, I sensed the thrill of excitement. I was writing a new project, and I faced a wall. I wasn’t sure if it was possible an effective approach to write certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Going through this book, I saw that there was a way.

Published in 1995, the story is a dark flight through the mind of a young serial killer, Quentin P, modeled after a notorious figure, the murderer who killed and cut apart multiple victims in a city over a decade. Notoriously, the killer was obsessed with making a compliant victim that would remain him and carried out several macabre trials to achieve this.

The acts the story tells are appalling, but just as scary is its emotional authenticity. The character’s terrible, fragmented world is plainly told with concise language, details omitted. The audience is plunged caught in his thoughts, compelled to witness mental processes and behaviors that shock. The alien nature of his mind is like a tangible impact – or getting lost in an empty realm. Entering this story feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced having night terrors. At one point, the horror included a nightmare in which I was stuck within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had removed a part out of the window frame, trying to get out. That building was falling apart; during heavy rain the downstairs hall filled with water, insect eggs came down from the roof onto the bed, and once a large rat scaled the curtains in my sister’s room.

When a friend handed me this author’s book, I had moved out with my parents, but the narrative of the house located on the coastline felt familiar to myself, homesick as I was. This is a novel featuring a possessed loud, emotional house and a young woman who eats calcium off the rocks. I cherished the story so much and returned again and again to its pages, always finding {something