🔗 Share this article

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I encountered this tale long ago and it has stayed with me from that moment. The titular vacationers happen to be a family from the city, who rent an identical remote lakeside house annually. During this visit, rather than returning to urban life, they choose to prolong their stay an extra month – a decision that to disturb each resident in the surrounding community. Each repeats a similar vague warning that nobody has remained at the lake beyond the end of summer. Nonetheless, the Allisons insist to remain, and that is the moment situations commence to become stranger. The man who delivers the kerosene refuses to sell to them. No one agrees to bring food to their home, and at the time the Allisons attempt to go to the village, the car fails to start. Bad weather approaches, the power within the device fade, and when night comes, “the elderly couple crowded closely within their rental and waited”. What are this couple anticipating? What do the locals understand? Whenever I read the writer’s disturbing and influential story, I recall that the best horror stems from what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative two people journey to a common seaside town where bells ring continuously, a constant chiming that is irritating and inexplicable. The initial very scary moment occurs after dark, at the time they decide to take a walk and they can’t find the ocean. The beach is there, there is the odor of putrid marine life and seawater, waves crash, but the ocean appears spectral, or something else and even more alarming. It is simply insanely sinister and each occasion I go to the shore in the evening I recall this narrative that ruined the sea at night for me – in a good way.

The young couple – she’s very young, the man is mature – head back to the inn and find out the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and demise and innocence encounters danse macabre bedlam. It’s a chilling reflection regarding craving and deterioration, a pair of individuals aging together as partners, the attachment and aggression and tenderness within wedlock.

Not merely the most frightening, but probably among the finest concise narratives out there, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in Spanish, in the first edition of this author’s works to be published in this country several years back.

Catriona Ward

Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates

I read Zombie near the water in the French countryside a few years ago. Although it was sunny I experienced cold creep through me. I also felt the electricity of excitement. I was working on a new project, and I faced a wall. I was uncertain if it was possible an effective approach to compose some of the fearful things the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I realized that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a dark flight through the mind of a murderer, Quentin P, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who killed and dismembered multiple victims in a city during a specific period. Infamously, Dahmer was fixated with producing a compliant victim that would remain with him and made many macabre trials to do so.

The deeds the novel describes are appalling, but just as scary is its own emotional authenticity. The character’s terrible, shattered existence is directly described using minimal words, identities hidden. You is sunk deep stuck in his mind, compelled to witness mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The foreignness of his psyche resembles a bodily jolt – or getting lost in an empty realm. Entering Zombie is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. Once, the fear featured a vision where I was trapped within an enclosure and, as I roused, I discovered that I had removed the slat out of the window frame, attempting to escape. That building was falling apart; during heavy rain the ground floor corridor flooded, maggots came down from the roof into the bedroom, and at one time a big rodent ascended the window coverings in the bedroom.

When a friend gave me this author’s book, I had moved out at my family home, but the story of the house located on the coastline appeared known to me, longing as I was. It’s a book featuring a possessed noisy, sentimental building and a female character who eats chalk off the rocks. I loved the book immensely and returned repeatedly to its pages, consistently uncovering {something