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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson

I discovered this tale years ago and it has haunted me from that moment. The titular seasonal visitors happen to be a family from the city, who occupy an identical off-grid rural cabin every summer. During this visit, in place of heading back to urban life, they choose to lengthen their stay an extra month – a decision that to alarm all the locals in the surrounding community. All pass on an identical cryptic advice that nobody has lingered in the area after Labor Day. Nonetheless, the couple insist to stay, and that is the moment things start to become stranger. The man who brings the kerosene won’t sell to the couple. No one will deliver food to the cottage, and when they attempt to drive into town, their vehicle refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the energy of their radio diminish, and when night comes, “the elderly couple clung to each other inside their cabin and expected”. What could be this couple waiting for? What could the locals know? Whenever I peruse the writer’s unnerving and inspiring story, I remember that the best horror stems from that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by a noted author

In this brief tale two people go to a typical seaside town where church bells toll constantly, a constant chiming that is bothersome and inexplicable. The opening truly frightening scene takes place at night, when they choose to take a walk and they can’t find the sea. There’s sand, there’s the smell 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 every time I travel to a beach after dark I think about this tale which spoiled the beach in the evening in my view – favorably.

The young couple – she’s very young, the man is mature – go back to their lodging and learn the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and mortality and youth meets danse macabre pandemonium. It is a disturbing reflection about longing and deterioration, two people maturing in tandem as partners, the connection and brutality and affection in matrimony.

Not only the most frightening, but probably a top example of short stories in existence, and a personal favourite. I read it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of these tales to be released in this country in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into Zombie by a pool overseas in 2020. Despite the sunshine I experienced cold creep over me. I also experienced the thrill of fascination. I was working on a new project, and I faced an obstacle. I was uncertain if it was possible a proper method to write certain terrifying elements the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I understood that there was a way.

Released decades ago, the book is a dark flight into the thoughts of a criminal, the protagonist, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who slaughtered and cut apart multiple victims in a city during a specific period. As is well-known, this person was consumed with creating a compliant victim who would never leave with him and carried out several grisly attempts to achieve this.

The acts the novel describes are terrible, but similarly terrifying is its emotional authenticity. Quentin P’s dreadful, broken reality is directly described using minimal words, names redacted. You is immersed caught in his thoughts, compelled to observe mental processes and behaviors that appal. The alien nature of his mind resembles a physical shock – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Starting this story feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

During my youth, I sleepwalked and later started suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the terror featured a vision in which I was trapped within an enclosure and, as I roused, I found that I had removed a part off the window, attempting to escape. That building was decaying; when it rained heavily the ground floor corridor filled with water, fly larvae fell from the ceiling on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a sizeable vermin climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.

When a friend gave me this author’s book, I had moved out in my childhood residence, but the story regarding the building perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable in my view, longing as I was. It is a book concerning a ghostly clamorous, emotional house and a young woman who ingests chalk from the shoreline. I adored the book deeply and returned again and again to it, consistently uncovering {something