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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by a master of suspense

I encountered this narrative long ago and it has stayed with me from that moment. The titular seasonal visitors are a couple from New York, who occupy an identical off-grid country cottage each year. This time, in place of heading back home, they choose to prolong their vacation a few more weeks – something that seems to alarm everyone in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that not a soul has ever stayed by the water after the end of summer. Nonetheless, the Allisons are determined to remain, and at that point events begin to get increasingly weird. The person who delivers oil declines to provide for them. Not a single person is willing to supply groceries to their home, and when they endeavor to drive into town, the car fails to start. A tempest builds, the energy within the device diminish, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals huddled together in their summer cottage and waited”. What might be the Allisons expecting? What do the residents understand? Whenever I read this author’s disturbing and thought-provoking narrative, I remember that the best horror originates in what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes from a noted author

In this concise narrative a pair travel to a typical seaside town where church bells toll continuously, a perpetual pealing that is annoying and unexplainable. The first very scary scene occurs after dark, as they opt to take a walk and they are unable to locate the sea. There’s sand, there’s the smell of rotting fish and seawater, there are waves, but the water appears spectral, or a different entity and more dreadful. It’s just profoundly ominous and every time I go to the coast after dark I remember this tale that ruined the beach in the evening to my mind – positively.

The recent spouses – the wife is youthful, he’s not – go back to their lodging and find out the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and death-and-the-maiden meets danse macabre bedlam. It’s a chilling reflection regarding craving and decay, a pair of individuals aging together as a couple, the bond and aggression and affection in matrimony.

Not just the scariest, but perhaps one of the best short stories available, and a beloved choice. I encountered it in Spanish, in the initial publication of this author’s works to be published in Argentina in 2011.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I read this narrative by a pool in France in 2020. Even with the bright weather I experienced an icy feeling over me. I also felt the electricity of fascination. I was writing my third novel, and I encountered an obstacle. I was uncertain if it was possible a proper method to craft certain terrifying elements the story includes. Reading Zombie, I realized that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a grim journey within the psyche of a murderer, the main character, inspired by an infamous individual, the criminal who murdered and cut apart numerous individuals in Milwaukee during a specific period. As is well-known, this person was obsessed with creating a compliant victim that would remain with him and made many horrific efforts to do so.

The actions the novel describes are appalling, but equally frightening is its own psychological persuasiveness. The character’s dreadful, broken reality is directly described in spare prose, identities hidden. The reader is plunged trapped in his consciousness, forced to witness mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The alien nature of his psyche feels like a physical shock – or getting lost in an empty realm. Going into Zombie is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I walked in my sleep and subsequently commenced having night terrors. At one point, the horror involved a dream where I was stuck inside a container and, when I woke up, I found that I had torn off the slat out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That home was falling apart; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall flooded, fly larvae dropped from above onto the bed, and on one occasion a large rat climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.

After an acquaintance presented me with the story, I was no longer living in my childhood residence, but the narrative of the house perched on the cliffs felt familiar in my view, homesick as I was. This is a novel concerning a ghostly loud, sentimental building and a young woman who ingests limestone from the shoreline. I cherished the novel deeply and went back frequently to its pages, each time discovering {something