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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I encountered this narrative long ago and it has stayed with me from that moment. The so-called seasonal visitors are the Allisons urban dwellers, who rent the same off-grid lakeside house each year. During this visit, instead of going back to the city, they decide to extend their stay a few more weeks – a decision that to unsettle each resident in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that no one has lingered in the area past Labor Day. Even so, the Allisons are determined to remain, and at that point situations commence to become stranger. The person who brings oil won’t sell for them. Not a single person will deliver supplies to the cabin, and when they attempt to go to the village, the automobile refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the power within the device die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people clung to each other in their summer cottage and expected”. What could be this couple waiting for? What could the locals understand? Every time I peruse the writer’s disturbing and influential narrative, I recall that the best horror stems from that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this short story a pair travel to a typical coastal village where bells ring continuously, an incessant ringing that is irritating and inexplicable. The first truly frightening episode happens at night, when they decide to walk around and they fail to see the water. There’s sand, there’s the smell of rotting fish and brine, waves crash, but the ocean is a ghost, or a different entity and more dreadful. It’s just profoundly ominous and every time I visit to the shore in the evening I recall this story that ruined the ocean after dark for me – in a good way.

The young couple – she’s very young, the husband is older – return to the hotel and learn why the bells ring, during a prolonged scene of confinement, macabre revelry and mortality and youth meets dance of death pandemonium. It’s an unnerving reflection on desire and deterioration, a pair of individuals maturing in tandem as spouses, the bond and aggression and tenderness of marriage.

Not only the most terrifying, but likely a top example of brief tales in existence, and a beloved choice. I encountered it in Spanish, in the first edition of these tales to be released in Argentina a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this narrative beside the swimming area in France recently. Despite the sunshine I experienced an icy feeling within me. I also experienced the electricity of anticipation. I was working on my latest book, and I had hit an obstacle. I was uncertain whether there existed a proper method to compose various frightening aspects the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I realized that there was a way.

Released decades ago, the novel is a bleak exploration into the thoughts of a young serial killer, the main character, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who killed and mutilated multiple victims in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, Dahmer was fixated with producing a compliant victim who would stay by his side and carried out several grisly attempts to do so.

The acts the novel describes are terrible, but just as scary is its own mental realism. The protagonist’s terrible, fragmented world is plainly told using minimal words, names redacted. The audience is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, forced to witness mental processes and behaviors that appal. The strangeness of his psyche resembles a physical shock – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Entering this book is less like reading but a complete immersion. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and subsequently commenced suffering from bad dreams. Once, the terror included a dream during which I was stuck inside a container and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had removed a piece off the window, attempting to escape. That home was decaying; during heavy rain the entranceway filled with water, insect eggs fell from the ceiling onto the bed, and on one occasion a large rat ascended the window coverings in the bedroom.

Once a companion handed me the story, I was no longer living at my family home, but the tale of the house high on the Dover cliffs appeared known to me, nostalgic as I felt. This is a book about a haunted clamorous, emotional house and a female character who eats chalk from the shoreline. I loved the book so much and came back frequently to it, consistently uncovering {something