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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from a master of suspense

I encountered this story some time back and it has lingered with me from that moment. The so-called “summer people” are the Allisons urban dwellers, who occupy a particular remote country cottage every summer. During this visit, in place of going back home, they decide to lengthen their holiday a few more weeks – something that seems to alarm each resident in the adjacent village. Each repeats a similar vague warning that nobody has remained in the area after the holiday. Regardless, they are resolved to remain, and that is the moment situations commence to become stranger. The man who supplies fuel declines to provide to the couple. No one will deliver supplies to the cottage, and as they try to drive into town, their vehicle refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the power within the device die, and as darkness falls, “the two old people huddled together inside their cabin and expected”. What are the Allisons waiting for? What do the townspeople know? Every time I revisit the writer’s disturbing and influential tale, I remember that the best horror originates in what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this short story two people journey to a common coastal village where church bells toll constantly, a constant chiming that is irritating and unexplainable. The opening truly frightening moment takes place after dark, when they choose to go for a stroll and they fail to see the ocean. There’s sand, there is the odor of rotting fish and brine, waves crash, but the sea seems phantom, or another thing and more dreadful. It’s just profoundly ominous and each occasion I visit to the coast after dark I recall this tale which spoiled the sea at night in my view – in a good way.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, the husband is older – go back to the inn and find out why the bells ring, in a long sequence of confinement, macabre revelry and mortality and youth intersects with dance of death pandemonium. It is a disturbing reflection on desire and deterioration, two people growing old jointly as partners, the bond and aggression and affection within wedlock.

Not only the scariest, but probably among the finest short stories in existence, and a beloved choice. I read it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of this author’s works to be released in Argentina in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer

I delved into this narrative by a pool in the French countryside a few years ago. Although it was sunny I felt a chill through me. I also felt the electricity of anticipation. I was writing my third novel, and I faced an obstacle. I wasn’t sure whether there existed an effective approach to compose some of the fearful things the book contains. Experiencing this novel, I saw that it could be done.

Published in 1995, the book is a bleak exploration through the mind of a young serial killer, Quentin P, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who slaughtered and dismembered multiple victims in a city between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, the killer was consumed with producing a submissive individual who would stay by his side and attempted numerous macabre trials to accomplish it.

The acts the novel describes are horrific, but equally frightening is the mental realism. The protagonist’s terrible, broken reality is simply narrated using minimal words, identities hidden. The audience is plunged caught in his thoughts, forced to observe mental processes and behaviors that appal. The foreignness of his psyche is like a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Entering this story is not just reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and eventually began having night terrors. At one point, the terror featured a dream during which I was trapped inside a container and, upon awakening, I realized that I had torn off a part out of the window frame, trying to get out. That building was falling apart; when it rained heavily the entranceway flooded, insect eggs fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and at one time a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in the bedroom.

After an acquaintance handed me the story, I had moved out at my family home, but the tale regarding the building perched on the cliffs felt familiar in my view, longing at that time. It’s a story concerning a ghostly clamorous, emotional house and a girl who consumes limestone from the shoreline. I adored the book immensely and returned frequently to the story, each time discovering {something