Andrew Michael Hurley
The Summer People from Shirley Jackson
I discovered this tale long ago and it has stayed with me ever since. The named “summer people” are a family urban dwellers, who lease the same isolated country cottage annually. This time, rather than heading back home, they choose to lengthen their vacation an extra month – a decision that to alarm all the locals in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that nobody has remained at the lake after the end of summer. Regardless, the Allisons are resolved to stay, and at that point things start to get increasingly weird. The person who delivers oil refuses to sell for them. Not a single person is willing to supply food to the cabin, and as they attempt to travel to the community, the automobile refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the power of their radio die, and when night comes, “the aged individuals clung to each other in their summer cottage and waited”. What are this couple expecting? What might the townspeople know? Whenever I revisit the writer’s disturbing and influential story, I recall that the top terror comes from the unspoken.
Mariana Enríquez
An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman
In this short story two people go to a common coastal village where church bells toll continuously, a perpetual pealing that is annoying and unexplainable. The first truly frightening scene occurs at night, when they choose to walk around and they are unable to locate the ocean. Sand is present, the scent exists of decaying seafood and seawater, surf is audible, but the ocean is a ghost, or a different entity and worse. It is truly deeply malevolent and whenever I travel to the coast at night I remember this tale which spoiled the beach in the evening for me – favorably.
The newlyweds – the wife is youthful, the husband is older – head back to the inn and discover why the bells ring, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and demise and innocence intersects with dance of death pandemonium. It is a disturbing reflection on desire and decline, a pair of individuals aging together as a couple, the bond and violence and gentleness of marriage.
Not only the most terrifying, but likely a top example of short stories out there, and a beloved choice. I encountered it in Spanish, in the initial publication of these tales to be released in Argentina several years back.
Catriona Ward
A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates
I delved into this book near the water in France recently. Even with the bright weather I experienced an icy feeling through me. I also felt the excitement of anticipation. I was writing my third novel, and I encountered a wall. I wasn’t sure if there was a proper method to compose certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Experiencing this novel, I saw that there was a way.
First printed in the nineties, the book is a bleak exploration through the mind of a young serial killer, the protagonist, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who killed and cut apart 17 young men and boys in a city between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, the killer was fixated with producing a compliant victim who would stay him and attempted numerous grisly attempts to achieve this.
The acts the book depicts are appalling, but similarly terrifying is the mental realism. The character’s terrible, broken reality is plainly told in spare prose, details omitted. The audience is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, forced to witness ideas and deeds that horrify. The strangeness of his psyche is like a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Starting this story feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.
An Accomplished Author
A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi
In my early years, I was a somnambulist and later started experiencing nightmares. On one occasion, the terror involved a dream in which I was trapped inside a container and, as I roused, I found that I had removed a piece off the window, seeking to leave. That house was crumbling; when it rained heavily the entranceway flooded, insect eggs came down from the roof into the bedroom, and once a big rodent scaled the curtains in that space.
When a friend handed me this author’s book, I had moved out at my family home, but the story about the home located on the coastline felt familiar to myself, homesick as I was. It’s a story concerning a ghostly noisy, atmospheric home and a female character who ingests limestone off the rocks. I loved the story deeply and came back again and again to it, each time discovering {something
