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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I read this narrative years ago and it has haunted me since then. The named seasonal visitors happen to be the Allisons from the city, who rent the same off-grid rural cabin each year. This time, rather than returning to the city, they choose to extend their stay for a month longer – something that seems to alarm each resident in the adjacent village. All pass on the same veiled caution that nobody has lingered by the water past the end of summer. Nonetheless, the couple insist to stay, and at that point situations commence to grow more bizarre. The individual who supplies fuel refuses to sell to the couple. Not a single person agrees to bring food to the cabin, and when they try to travel to the community, the automobile refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the batteries in the radio diminish, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple clung to each other inside their cabin and expected”. What are they anticipating? What could the residents understand? Whenever I read this author’s chilling and thought-provoking tale, I’m reminded that the top terror stems from that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by a noted author

In this concise narrative a couple travel to a common seaside town in which chimes sound the whole time, a constant chiming that is irritating and puzzling. The initial very scary moment occurs during the evening, as they decide to take a walk and they can’t find the water. The beach is there, there’s the smell of rotting fish and salt, there are waves, but the ocean is a ghost, or a different entity and worse. It’s just insanely sinister and every time I travel to the coast in the evening I remember this tale that destroyed the sea at night to my mind – positively.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – head back to the inn and discover the reason for the chiming, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden meets danse macabre chaos. It’s an unnerving meditation on desire and decline, a pair of individuals aging together as partners, the connection and aggression and gentleness within wedlock.

Not just the most frightening, but perhaps one of the best short stories available, and an individual preference. I read it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of this author’s works to appear in this country in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates

I read this book near the water in France recently. Although it was sunny I felt an icy feeling over me. I also experienced the thrill of anticipation. I was writing a new project, and I faced an obstacle. I was uncertain whether there existed any good way to write various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Going through this book, I understood that it was possible.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a bleak exploration through the mind of a criminal, the main character, inspired by a notorious figure, the murderer who slaughtered and cut apart numerous individuals in the Midwest during a specific period. Infamously, the killer was fixated with making a submissive individual who would never leave with him and made many horrific efforts to accomplish it.

The deeds the book depicts are terrible, but just as scary is its own psychological persuasiveness. The protagonist’s dreadful, broken reality is directly described with concise language, identities hidden. The reader is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, compelled to observe thoughts and actions that shock. The foreignness of his mind is like a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Entering this book feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I walked in my sleep and subsequently commenced having night terrors. Once, the fear included a dream during which I was stuck in a box and, when I woke up, I found that I had torn off a part off the window, attempting to escape. That house was decaying; when storms came the downstairs hall filled with water, maggots dropped from above into the bedroom, and once a large rat scaled the curtains in that space.

When a friend gave me the story, I had moved out at my family home, but the narrative of the house high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to myself, homesick at that time. This is a novel about a haunted loud, sentimental building and a girl who ingests chalk from the shoreline. I loved the novel deeply and returned repeatedly to its pages, each time discovering {something