🔗 Share this article

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I read this narrative years ago and it has lingered with me ever since. The titular seasonal visitors happen to be a couple from New York, who rent an identical isolated rural cabin each year. During this visit, in place of going back to urban life, they opt to lengthen their holiday an extra month – something that seems to alarm all the locals in the surrounding community. All pass on the same veiled caution that nobody has ever stayed by the water after Labor Day. Even so, they are determined to remain, and at that point events begin to grow more bizarre. The individual who brings fuel won’t sell to the couple. Not a single person agrees to bring groceries to their home, and at the time the Allisons attempt to go to the village, the car refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the power of their radio die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple huddled together in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What could be the Allisons expecting? What might the locals be aware of? Each occasion I peruse the writer’s unnerving and thought-provoking narrative, I recall that the finest fright stems from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a pair go to a common beach community where bells ring constantly, an incessant ringing that is annoying and puzzling. The opening truly frightening moment happens during the evening, at the time they opt to walk around and they can’t find the sea. There’s sand, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and brine, there are waves, but the sea seems phantom, or another thing and worse. It is simply insanely sinister and each occasion I go to the shore at night I think about this story that destroyed the sea at night in my view – in a good way.

The newlyweds – the woman is adolescent, the husband is older – return to their lodging and discover the reason for the chiming, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and demise and innocence intersects with danse macabre bedlam. It’s an unnerving reflection on desire and decline, two bodies maturing in tandem as a couple, the connection and violence and gentleness of marriage.

Not just the most terrifying, but likely among the finest brief tales available, and an individual preference. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of these tales to appear in this country a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates

I read this narrative by a pool overseas a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I felt cold creep over me. I also felt the electricity of anticipation. I was writing my third novel, and I faced an obstacle. I was uncertain if it was possible any good way to write some of the fearful things the book contains. Going through this book, I saw that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a dark flight through the mind of a young serial killer, the main character, inspired by an infamous individual, the criminal who slaughtered and mutilated multiple victims in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, the killer was fixated with producing a submissive individual that would remain him and carried out several grisly attempts to achieve this.

The actions the book depicts are appalling, but equally frightening is its own psychological persuasiveness. The protagonist’s awful, broken reality is simply narrated with concise language, details omitted. You is sunk deep stuck in his mind, compelled to witness mental processes and behaviors that appal. The alien nature of his thinking resembles a tangible impact – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Starting Zombie is not just reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and later started experiencing nightmares. Once, the terror involved a vision where I was trapped in a box and, upon awakening, I realized that I had ripped a piece off the window, trying to get out. That house was falling apart; when storms came the ground floor corridor flooded, maggots fell from the ceiling on to my parents’ bed, and at one time a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

Once a companion gave me this author’s book, I had moved out in my childhood residence, but the narrative regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs appeared known to me, nostalgic as I was. This is a story about a haunted noisy, sentimental building and a female character who eats limestone from the cliffs. I adored the story deeply and returned repeatedly to its pages, consistently uncovering {something