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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson

I encountered this narrative some time back and it has lingered with me ever since. The named vacationers turn out to be a family from New York, who occupy a particular remote rural cabin every summer. On this occasion, instead of returning to the city, they choose to lengthen their vacation for a month longer – something that seems to disturb each resident in the surrounding community. Each repeats a similar vague warning that nobody has lingered at the lake beyond Labor Day. Even so, the Allisons are resolved to not leave, and that’s when situations commence to get increasingly weird. The individual who brings the kerosene won’t sell for them. No one is willing to supply groceries to the cottage, and at the time the Allisons try to drive into town, their vehicle won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the energy within the device fade, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple crowded closely in their summer cottage and waited”. What are they anticipating? What could the townspeople be aware of? Each occasion I read this author’s unnerving and thought-provoking tale, I remember that the finest fright stems from what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from a noted author

In this short story a couple travel to an ordinary coastal village where bells ring continuously, a constant chiming that is bothersome and inexplicable. The opening very scary moment takes place during the evening, as they decide to walk around and they are unable to locate the sea. The beach is there, there is the odor of putrid marine life and brine, there are waves, but the ocean appears spectral, or something else and even more alarming. It is truly profoundly ominous and each occasion I visit to the coast in the evening I recall this story that ruined the beach in the evening for me – positively.

The newlyweds – the woman is adolescent, the husband is older – head back to the inn and find out the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of confinement, gruesome festivities and demise and innocence intersects with grim ballet chaos. It’s an unnerving meditation about longing and deterioration, two bodies aging together as partners, the connection and brutality and tenderness within wedlock.

Not only the most terrifying, but probably among the finest short stories out there, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in Spanish, in the first edition of these tales to appear in Argentina in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from an esteemed writer

I delved into this narrative by a pool overseas recently. Although it was sunny I felt a chill over me. I also felt the electricity of fascination. I was writing a new project, and I had hit a wall. I was uncertain whether there existed an effective approach to craft certain terrifying elements the story includes. Going through this book, I realized that it could be done.

Published in 1995, the story is a dark flight within the psyche of a young serial killer, Quentin P, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who slaughtered and mutilated 17 young men and boys in the Midwest over a decade. Infamously, this person was consumed with creating a submissive individual that would remain by his side and attempted numerous horrific efforts to achieve this.

The actions the story tells are appalling, but similarly terrifying is the mental realism. The protagonist’s terrible, shattered existence is plainly told with concise language, identities hidden. The audience is immersed stuck in his mind, compelled to observe mental processes and behaviors that appal. The strangeness of his psyche is like a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated on a desolate planet. Starting this story feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from a gifted writer

When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and subsequently commenced having night terrors. At one point, the terror included a nightmare in which I was trapped inside a container and, when I woke up, I found that I had ripped a part out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That house was decaying; when storms came the entranceway became inundated, insect eggs came down from the roof onto the bed, and once a big rodent scaled the curtains in that space.

When a friend presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out at my family home, but the narrative of the house located on the coastline felt familiar to myself, nostalgic at that time. It is a story concerning a ghostly clamorous, atmospheric home and a young woman who consumes calcium from the cliffs. I loved the book immensely and came back frequently to its pages, consistently uncovering {something