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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by a master of suspense

I read this story some time back and it has lingered with me since then. The so-called “summer people” are the Allisons urban dwellers, who lease a particular remote country cottage each year. During this visit, instead of going back home, they choose to lengthen their vacation for a month longer – an action that appears to alarm each resident in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that not a soul has remained by the water beyond Labor Day. Regardless, they are determined to remain, and that is the moment events begin to become stranger. The individual who brings fuel refuses to sell to the couple. Nobody is willing to supply food to the cottage, and when they try to go to the village, the automobile fails to start. A tempest builds, the batteries within the device die, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple huddled together in their summer cottage and waited”. What are this couple anticipating? What could the townspeople understand? Whenever I revisit this author’s chilling and thought-provoking story, I recall that the top terror stems from that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes by a noted author

In this brief tale a couple journey to a typical seaside town in which chimes sound the whole time, an incessant ringing that is irritating and puzzling. The opening extremely terrifying moment happens during the evening, at the time they choose to walk around and they can’t find the ocean. Sand is present, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and salt, surf is audible, but the sea seems phantom, or another thing and more dreadful. It is simply deeply malevolent and each occasion I visit to a beach at night I remember this story which spoiled the beach in the evening for me – in a good way.

The young couple – she’s very young, he’s not – go back to their lodging and find out why the bells ring, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and death-and-the-maiden intersects with danse macabre chaos. It is a disturbing reflection about longing and decline, two people aging together as a couple, the connection and brutality and gentleness of marriage.

Not only the scariest, but perhaps a top example of concise narratives in existence, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in Spanish, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to appear locally a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into Zombie near the water in the French countryside recently. Although it was sunny I sensed an icy feeling through me. Additionally, I sensed the excitement of excitement. I was writing my latest book, and I had hit an obstacle. I wasn’t sure if there was a proper method to write certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Experiencing this novel, I understood that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the book is a dark flight into the thoughts of a young serial killer, the main character, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who killed and cut apart multiple victims in Milwaukee during a specific period. Notoriously, this person was consumed with creating a zombie sex slave who would stay by his side and made many grisly attempts to accomplish it.

The deeds the novel describes are horrific, but equally frightening is its mental realism. Quentin P’s awful, broken reality is simply narrated with concise language, names redacted. The reader is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, obliged to witness mental processes and behaviors that appal. The strangeness of his thinking feels like a tangible impact – or finding oneself isolated on a desolate planet. Starting this story feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced having night terrors. On one occasion, the terror involved a vision where I was stuck in a box and, as I roused, I found that I had ripped a part off the window, attempting to escape. That house was falling apart; when storms came the ground floor corridor filled with water, insect eggs dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and once a sizeable vermin climbed the drapes in that space.

Once a companion gave me the story, I had moved out in my childhood residence, but the story about the home located on the coastline appeared known to myself, homesick as I felt. It is a novel concerning a ghostly noisy, emotional house and a female character who consumes calcium from the cliffs. I loved the novel immensely and came back repeatedly to its pages, each time discovering {something