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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I discovered this narrative long ago and it has lingered with me from that moment. The named seasonal visitors are a couple urban dwellers, who lease an identical remote rural cabin each year. This time, in place of returning to urban life, they decide to lengthen their vacation a few more weeks – something that seems to alarm each resident in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that no one has ever stayed by the water past Labor Day. Nonetheless, the Allisons are determined to stay, and that’s when events begin to become stranger. The man who brings fuel refuses to sell to them. Not a single person agrees to bring supplies to their home, and as they try to travel to the community, their vehicle fails to start. A tempest builds, the power of their radio diminish, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple crowded closely inside their cabin and expected”. What could be the Allisons waiting for? What might the residents understand? Each occasion I read this author’s disturbing and inspiring story, I’m reminded that the finest fright comes from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a pair go to a common beach community where bells ring continuously, an incessant ringing that is irritating and unexplainable. The opening truly frightening episode happens at night, as they opt to walk around and they are unable to locate the ocean. There’s sand, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and salt, there are waves, but the sea appears spectral, or something else and worse. It is simply deeply malevolent and every time I visit to the shore at night I recall this narrative that destroyed the ocean after dark for me – positively.

The young couple – she’s very young, he’s not – return to their lodging and discover the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of confinement, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth encounters danse macabre bedlam. It is a disturbing meditation about longing and decline, two bodies maturing in tandem as partners, the bond and aggression and tenderness in matrimony.

Not just the scariest, but probably a top example of concise narratives out there, and an individual preference. I encountered it in Spanish, in the debut release of Aickman stories to appear in Argentina several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I delved into this book beside the swimming area in the French countryside recently. Despite the sunshine I felt a chill within me. I also felt the electricity of fascination. I was writing my latest book, and I encountered a block. I wasn’t sure if there was any good way to craft certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I understood that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the story is a bleak exploration into the thoughts of a murderer, the main character, based on a notorious figure, the serial killer who slaughtered and mutilated numerous individuals in a city during a specific period. Notoriously, Dahmer was obsessed with creating a submissive individual that would remain with him and carried out several grisly attempts to accomplish it.

The actions the book depicts are horrific, but similarly terrifying is the psychological persuasiveness. The protagonist’s awful, fragmented world is simply narrated in spare prose, names redacted. The reader is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, forced to observe thoughts and actions that appal. The strangeness of his psyche is like a bodily jolt – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Starting this story is less like reading but a complete immersion. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

In my early years, I walked in my sleep and eventually began having night terrors. On one occasion, the horror involved a dream in which I was stuck in a box and, as I roused, I found that I had ripped a part from the window, attempting to escape. That building was crumbling; during heavy rain the downstairs hall became inundated, maggots came down from the roof into the bedroom, and on one occasion a big rodent scaled the curtains in that space.

After an acquaintance handed me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living with my parents, but the tale of the house perched on the cliffs felt familiar to me, homesick as I felt. It’s a book featuring a possessed clamorous, sentimental building and a young woman who consumes chalk off the rocks. I cherished the book so much and returned repeatedly to it, each time discovering {something