🔗 Share this article

Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by a master of suspense

I encountered this narrative long ago and it has lingered with me ever since. The titular vacationers happen to be a couple urban dwellers, who lease the same remote lakeside house annually. On this occasion, in place of heading back home, they choose to extend their holiday an extra month – something that seems to alarm each resident in the nearby town. Each repeats a similar vague warning that not a soul has lingered in the area past the holiday. Even so, the couple are determined to not leave, and that is the moment situations commence to grow more bizarre. The person who brings oil refuses to sell to the couple. No one will deliver supplies to their home, and at the time they try to go to the village, the automobile refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the energy in the radio diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple crowded closely within their rental and expected”. What are they waiting for? What might the locals understand? Each occasion I peruse the writer’s chilling and influential tale, I recall that the best horror stems from that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this short story two people go to a common coastal village where church bells toll the whole time, a constant chiming that is irritating and inexplicable. The first very scary scene takes place after dark, when they choose to go for a stroll and they fail to see the ocean. The beach is there, the scent exists of putrid marine life and brine, waves crash, but the ocean appears spectral, or a different entity and more dreadful. It’s just profoundly ominous and every time I travel to the shore in the evening I think about this story that destroyed the ocean after dark for me – positively.

The recent spouses – she’s very young, he’s not – head back to the inn and discover why the bells ring, during a prolonged scene of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and demise and innocence meets dance of death pandemonium. It’s an unnerving reflection about longing and decline, two bodies maturing in tandem as spouses, the bond and violence and tenderness in matrimony.

Not merely the most terrifying, but perhaps one of the best concise narratives available, and an individual preference. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of these tales to appear locally a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I perused this narrative by a pool in the French countryside recently. Although it was sunny I felt cold creep through me. Additionally, I sensed the thrill of excitement. I was working on my third novel, and I encountered an obstacle. I wasn’t sure if it was possible any good way to write certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Going through this book, I realized that it could be done.

Published in 1995, the novel is a dark flight within the psyche of a criminal, the protagonist, modeled after a notorious figure, the serial killer who murdered and mutilated numerous individuals in the Midwest over a decade. As is well-known, Dahmer was fixated with creating a submissive individual that would remain by his side and made many macabre trials to accomplish it.

The deeds the novel describes are terrible, but equally frightening is the psychological persuasiveness. The character’s terrible, shattered existence is simply narrated with concise language, identities hidden. The audience is immersed caught in his thoughts, forced to witness thoughts and actions that appal. The strangeness of his thinking resembles a physical shock – or getting lost on a desolate planet. Starting Zombie is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and later started experiencing nightmares. At one point, the fear involved a dream in which I was confined inside a container and, upon awakening, I discovered that I had removed the slat out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That building was crumbling; when storms came the entranceway filled with water, fly larvae fell from the ceiling onto the bed, and once a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in that space.

Once a companion handed me the story, I was no longer living at my family home, but the story about the home perched on the cliffs felt familiar to myself, nostalgic as I felt. It is a story featuring a possessed loud, atmospheric home and a young woman who eats chalk from the cliffs. I loved the book deeply and came back frequently to its pages, consistently uncovering {something