🔗 Share this article

Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from a master of suspense

I encountered this tale some time back and it has haunted me from that moment. The named vacationers are the Allisons from the city, who occupy the same isolated lakeside house each year. This time, rather than heading back to the city, they choose to lengthen their vacation an extra month – a decision that to unsettle everyone in the adjacent village. Each repeats a similar vague warning that not a soul has lingered at the lake past the holiday. Even so, the Allisons are resolved to remain, and that’s when events begin to grow more bizarre. The man who supplies fuel refuses to sell to them. Not a single person agrees to bring food to the cabin, and when the family try to drive into town, the automobile refuses to operate. A storm gathers, the batteries in the radio diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people huddled together in their summer cottage and waited”. What are this couple expecting? What could the locals understand? Whenever I revisit this author’s chilling and inspiring narrative, I’m reminded that the top terror originates in what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a couple go to a typical coastal village in which chimes sound the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and unexplainable. The first truly frightening episode takes place at night, at the time they choose to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the ocean. The beach is there, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and salt, there are waves, but the sea appears spectral, or another thing and more dreadful. It is truly deeply malevolent and whenever I visit to a beach in the evening I remember this tale that destroyed the sea at night for me – favorably.

The newlyweds – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – head back to the hotel and find out the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and death-and-the-maiden intersects with danse macabre chaos. It’s an unnerving contemplation on desire and decay, two bodies maturing in tandem as spouses, the bond and aggression and affection within wedlock.

Not just the most frightening, but perhaps a top example of brief tales in existence, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of these tales to be published in Argentina in 2011.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer

I perused Zombie beside the swimming area in the French countryside a few years ago. Despite the sunshine I sensed a chill within me. I also experienced the excitement of anticipation. I was writing a new project, and I had hit a block. I didn’t know whether there existed any good way to craft certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I understood that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a bleak exploration into the thoughts of a criminal, the protagonist, based on a notorious figure, the murderer who murdered and cut apart numerous individuals in Milwaukee over a decade. Notoriously, Dahmer was obsessed with making a zombie sex slave who would never leave by his side and made many grisly attempts to do so.

The deeds the story tells are appalling, but equally frightening is the emotional authenticity. The character’s awful, shattered existence is plainly told using minimal words, details omitted. You is sunk deep stuck in his mind, forced to witness ideas and deeds that shock. The foreignness of his psyche is like a bodily jolt – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Going into this story is not just reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

During my youth, I sleepwalked and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the horror involved a vision where I was trapped in a box and, upon awakening, I discovered that I had ripped a piece off the window, seeking to leave. That house was crumbling; during heavy rain the downstairs hall filled with water, maggots dropped from above onto the bed, and on one occasion a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in the bedroom.

Once a companion handed me the story, I was no longer living in my childhood residence, but the story regarding the building perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable to myself, homesick as I was. This is a novel concerning a ghostly loud, emotional house and a girl who eats limestone from the shoreline. I adored the novel deeply and returned again and again to its pages, each time discovering {something