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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I discovered this narrative years ago and it has haunted me ever since. The titular seasonal visitors turn out to be a family urban dwellers, who occupy an identical off-grid lakeside house each year. This time, in place of returning home, they choose to prolong their vacation a few more weeks – an action that appears to disturb all the locals in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that no one has ever stayed at the lake after Labor Day. Nonetheless, they insist to remain, and that’s when things start to grow more bizarre. The person who delivers oil declines to provide for them. Nobody is willing to supply food to the cottage, and when the family endeavor to go to the village, the car won’t start. A tempest builds, the batteries within the device diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the aged individuals crowded closely within their rental and waited”. What are they anticipating? What might the locals know? Every time I revisit Jackson’s disturbing and influential tale, I’m reminded that the finest fright comes from what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a couple journey to an ordinary seaside town where church bells toll the whole time, an incessant ringing that is annoying and unexplainable. The initial very scary episode takes place at night, as they choose to go for a stroll and they fail to see the water. Sand is present, there’s the smell of rotting fish and salt, waves crash, but the sea is a ghost, or another thing and more dreadful. It is truly profoundly ominous and every time I travel to the coast after dark I think about this narrative that destroyed the beach in the evening to my mind – positively.

The young couple – she’s very young, the husband is older – head back to their lodging and discover the cause of the ringing, during a prolonged scene of enclosed spaces, necro-orgy and demise and innocence encounters danse macabre chaos. It is a disturbing contemplation on desire and decline, two bodies maturing in tandem as a couple, the connection and aggression and gentleness within wedlock.

Not just the scariest, but perhaps one of the best brief tales in existence, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in Spanish, in the first edition of this author’s works to be released in Argentina several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates

I perused Zombie beside the swimming area in France in 2020. Although it was sunny I sensed an icy feeling over me. I also experienced the electricity of fascination. I was working on my latest book, and I had hit a block. I wasn’t sure whether there existed any good way to compose some of the fearful things the story includes. Going through this book, I understood that it could be done.

Released decades ago, the novel is a bleak exploration through the mind of a murderer, the main character, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who killed and dismembered 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee over a decade. Notoriously, this person was consumed with producing a compliant victim who would stay him and attempted numerous horrific efforts to achieve this.

The actions the book depicts are horrific, but equally frightening is the psychological persuasiveness. The character’s terrible, broken reality is simply narrated with concise language, names redacted. The audience is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, obliged to see mental processes and behaviors that shock. The strangeness of his mind feels like a physical shock – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Starting this story is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from a gifted writer

During my youth, I sleepwalked and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the terror included a vision during which I was trapped in a box and, as I roused, I realized that I had removed a part out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That house was falling apart; during heavy rain the ground floor corridor flooded, maggots dropped from above into the bedroom, and at one time a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in that space.

After an acquaintance handed me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out with my parents, but the tale about the home located on the coastline felt familiar to myself, nostalgic as I felt. It is a book concerning a ghostly loud, atmospheric home and a young woman who consumes calcium from the shoreline. I adored the novel so much and returned repeatedly to it, each time discovering {something