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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense

I discovered this narrative long ago and it has lingered with me from that moment. The so-called seasonal visitors turn out to be the Allisons from the city, who lease the same isolated country cottage annually. During this visit, instead of heading back to the city, they opt to lengthen their stay an extra month – an action that appears to unsettle all the locals in the nearby town. Each repeats the same veiled caution that not a soul has ever stayed at the lake beyond the end of summer. Regardless, they insist to stay, and at that point events begin to get increasingly weird. The person who supplies fuel declines to provide to them. Not a single person agrees to bring groceries to their home, and at the time the Allisons try to travel to the community, the car refuses to operate. A storm gathers, the power within the device diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people clung to each other within their rental and expected”. What could be they anticipating? What could the locals understand? Whenever I revisit this author’s disturbing and thought-provoking story, I remember that the top terror originates in that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a pair travel to a typical coastal village in which chimes sound the whole time, a constant chiming that is irritating and inexplicable. The initial truly frightening scene occurs at night, at the time they choose to go for a stroll and they fail to see the water. The beach is there, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and brine, waves crash, but the sea seems phantom, or a different entity and worse. It’s just deeply malevolent and every time I go to a beach after dark I remember this tale which spoiled the beach in the evening to my mind – favorably.

The young couple – she’s very young, he’s not – return to the inn and find out the reason for the chiming, during a prolonged scene of confinement, necro-orgy and mortality and youth encounters grim ballet bedlam. It’s an unnerving reflection about longing and decline, two people growing old jointly as spouses, the connection and aggression and tenderness within wedlock.

Not only the most terrifying, but likely among the finest brief tales in existence, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in Spanish, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to appear locally several years back.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I delved into Zombie beside the swimming area overseas a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I sensed an icy feeling through me. I also experienced the excitement of fascination. I was writing my latest book, and I faced a block. I was uncertain whether there existed any good way to compose various frightening aspects the story includes. Going through this book, I understood that it could be done.

Released decades ago, the story is a grim journey through the mind of a murderer, the protagonist, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who killed and cut apart multiple victims in a city between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, this person was consumed with making a compliant victim who would stay with him and made many grisly attempts to accomplish it.

The acts the book depicts are terrible, but just as scary is its emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s dreadful, broken reality is simply narrated using minimal words, names redacted. The reader is immersed stuck in his mind, obliged to see ideas and deeds that appal. The foreignness of his mind is like a physical shock – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Going into this story is less like reading but a complete immersion. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and later started suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the horror included a vision during which I was stuck inside a container and, as I roused, I found that I had removed the slat off the window, trying to get out. That house was decaying; when storms came the entranceway filled with water, insect eggs dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and once a large rat climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.

Once a companion gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the tale about the home perched on the cliffs felt familiar in my view, homesick as I felt. It is a story about a haunted clamorous, sentimental building and a young woman who ingests calcium off the rocks. I adored the book so much and went back repeatedly to the story, each time discovering {something