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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from a master of suspense

I read this narrative years ago and it has stayed with me since then. The so-called vacationers happen to be a couple from the city, who occupy an identical remote lakeside house every summer. This time, rather than heading back home, they opt to extend their holiday an extra month – a decision that to unsettle all the locals in the surrounding community. All pass on a similar vague warning that not a soul has ever stayed at the lake beyond the holiday. Nonetheless, the couple are determined to stay, and at that point things start to become stranger. The individual who brings fuel refuses to sell to the couple. Not a single person is willing to supply supplies to the cabin, and at the time the family attempt to travel to the community, the automobile refuses to operate. A storm gathers, the batteries in the radio diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people crowded closely within their rental and waited”. What are this couple waiting for? What do the locals know? Each occasion I revisit this author’s chilling and thought-provoking tale, I remember that the best horror stems from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a couple journey to an ordinary seaside town where church bells toll continuously, a constant chiming that is annoying and inexplicable. The first extremely terrifying scene takes place after dark, as they decide to go for a stroll and they can’t find the ocean. There’s sand, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and salt, there are waves, but the ocean is a ghost, or a different entity and even more alarming. It is truly deeply malevolent and every time I visit to a beach in the evening I remember this tale which spoiled the beach in the evening in my view – in a good way.

The young couple – the woman is adolescent, he’s not – go back to the hotel and find out why the bells ring, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and mortality and youth encounters dance of death chaos. It’s a chilling reflection on desire and decay, two bodies maturing in tandem as a couple, the bond and brutality and gentleness in matrimony.

Not just the scariest, but perhaps one of the best concise narratives in existence, and a personal favourite. I read it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of Aickman stories to appear locally a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer

I delved into this book by a pool in the French countryside in 2020. Although it was sunny I felt cold creep through me. I also experienced the excitement of excitement. I was writing a new project, and I faced a block. I was uncertain whether there existed an effective approach to write certain terrifying elements the book contains. Reading Zombie, I saw that it was possible.

Published in 1995, the book is a bleak exploration into the thoughts of a criminal, the main character, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who slaughtered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, the killer was obsessed with creating a compliant victim that would remain by his side and made many horrific efforts to accomplish it.

The deeds the book depicts are appalling, but just as scary is its own psychological persuasiveness. The character’s dreadful, fragmented world is plainly told with concise language, identities hidden. You is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, compelled to observe ideas and deeds that appal. The alien nature of his thinking resembles a tangible impact – or getting lost on a desolate planet. Entering Zombie is less like reading but a complete immersion. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and subsequently commenced suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the terror involved a nightmare during which I was stuck inside a container and, when I woke up, I realized that I had torn off the slat off the window, trying to get out. That house was crumbling; when storms came the downstairs hall became inundated, maggots dropped from above into the bedroom, and once a sizeable vermin climbed the drapes in that space.

When a friend handed me the story, I was no longer living in my childhood residence, but the story of the house perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable in my view, longing at that time. This is a story about a haunted clamorous, sentimental building and a female character who consumes calcium from the cliffs. I adored the story so much and went back frequently to the story, each time discovering {something