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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 titular seasonal visitors happen to be a family from the city, who occupy the same off-grid lakeside house each year. On this occasion, rather than returning to urban life, they choose to extend their holiday for a month longer – a decision that to unsettle each resident in the nearby town. Everyone conveys the same veiled caution that not a soul has remained at the lake past Labor Day. Nonetheless, the couple insist to remain, and at that point things start to get increasingly weird. The person who brings fuel declines to provide to them. Not a single person is willing to supply groceries to their home, and when they try to go to the village, the car won’t start. A storm gathers, the batteries in the radio die, and when night comes, “the two old people crowded closely inside their cabin and expected”. What might be this couple waiting for? What might the residents understand? Every time I peruse Jackson’s disturbing and inspiring story, I’m reminded that the best horror originates in that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by a noted author

In this concise narrative a pair go to an ordinary seaside town where church bells toll the whole time, a constant chiming that is irritating and inexplicable. The opening very scary scene takes place at night, as they opt to take a walk and they are unable to locate the sea. Sand is present, there is the odor of putrid marine life and seawater, there are waves, but the water seems phantom, or a different entity and even more alarming. It’s just profoundly ominous and every time I travel to the coast after dark I remember this story that ruined the sea at night in my view – favorably.

The young couple – she’s very young, the man is mature – return to their lodging and learn why the bells ring, during a prolonged scene of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth intersects with dance of death bedlam. It is a disturbing contemplation regarding craving and deterioration, two people maturing in tandem as partners, the bond and brutality and tenderness of marriage.

Not only the scariest, but perhaps a top example of brief tales available, and a personal favourite. I read it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of these tales to be released in this country a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

Zombie from an esteemed writer

I read this book beside the swimming area in the French countryside a few years ago. Despite the sunshine I felt an icy feeling over me. Additionally, I sensed the excitement of anticipation. I was writing my third novel, and I encountered an obstacle. I was uncertain if there was any good way to compose some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I saw that it was possible.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a dark flight through the mind of a murderer, the main character, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who killed and cut apart 17 young men and boys in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, the killer was consumed with producing a zombie sex slave who would stay by his side and attempted numerous macabre trials to do so.

The actions the novel describes are horrific, but just as scary is the psychological persuasiveness. The protagonist’s terrible, fragmented world is simply narrated using minimal words, names redacted. The reader is sunk deep stuck in his mind, forced to observe thoughts and actions that shock. The strangeness of his thinking feels like a physical shock – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Going into this story is not just reading than a full body experience. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I walked in my sleep and subsequently commenced having night terrors. On one occasion, the terror included a nightmare in which I was stuck within an enclosure and, as I roused, I found that I had ripped the slat from the window, trying to get out. That building was falling apart; when it rained heavily the entranceway flooded, insect eggs dropped from above onto the bed, and at one time a big rodent climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.

When a friend presented me with this author’s book, I had moved out with my parents, but the story regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs appeared known to myself, longing at that time. This is a novel about a haunted loud, sentimental building and a female character who ingests limestone off the rocks. I adored the novel immensely and came back again and again to it, always finding {something