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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I encountered this story long ago and it has haunted me since then. The so-called vacationers turn out to be a couple from New York, who occupy an identical remote country cottage each year. This time, in place of heading back home, they choose to extend their stay a few more weeks – a decision that to disturb all the locals in the nearby town. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that no one has lingered in the area beyond Labor Day. Even so, the Allisons are resolved to remain, and that is the moment situations commence to grow more bizarre. The person who supplies the kerosene declines to provide for them. No one agrees to bring food to the cottage, and at the time they attempt to travel to the community, their vehicle won’t start. A storm gathers, the batteries within the device die, and when night comes, “the elderly couple clung to each other in their summer cottage and waited”. What might be the Allisons waiting for? What could the townspeople know? Every time I revisit this author’s chilling and inspiring narrative, I recall that the best horror originates in that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from a noted author

In this short story a couple go to a common seaside town where church bells toll continuously, an incessant ringing that is annoying and unexplainable. The first very scary episode occurs at night, at the time they choose to go for a stroll and they fail to see the water. There’s sand, there’s the smell of rotting fish and salt, waves crash, but the ocean seems phantom, or another thing and worse. It is simply insanely sinister and whenever I go to the shore in the evening I recall this tale that destroyed the sea at night to my mind – favorably.

The young couple – the woman is adolescent, the husband is older – go back to the hotel and learn the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and demise and innocence meets danse macabre pandemonium. It’s an unnerving contemplation regarding craving and decline, a pair of individuals maturing in tandem as partners, the connection and brutality and gentleness in matrimony.

Not just the scariest, but perhaps among the finest concise narratives available, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of these tales to be published in this country several years back.

Catriona Ward

Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this book near the water in France recently. Although it was sunny I sensed a chill over me. I also experienced the excitement of excitement. I was working on my third novel, and I faced a block. I didn’t know if there was an effective approach to write various frightening aspects the story includes. Reading Zombie, I understood that it was possible.

Published in 1995, the novel is a grim journey through the mind of a murderer, Quentin P, modeled after a notorious figure, the murderer who murdered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, this person was obsessed with making a compliant victim that would remain by his side and made many macabre trials to accomplish it.

The deeds the book depicts are terrible, but equally frightening is its psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s dreadful, broken reality is plainly told with concise language, names redacted. The reader is immersed trapped in his consciousness, compelled to witness ideas and deeds that shock. The alien nature of his thinking resembles a bodily jolt – or getting lost in an empty realm. Entering Zombie is less like reading than a full body experience. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and later started having night terrors. Once, the horror featured a dream in which I was stuck within an enclosure and, upon awakening, I found that I had torn off a piece out of the window frame, attempting to escape. That house was crumbling; when storms came the entranceway flooded, fly larvae fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and once a big rodent ascended the window coverings in that space.

Once a companion gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out with my parents, but the story of the house located on the coastline seemed recognizable to me, nostalgic at that time. It’s a novel about a haunted clamorous, sentimental building and a girl who consumes calcium from the cliffs. I adored the story immensely and came back frequently to the story, consistently uncovering {something