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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson

I read this story some time back and it has lingered with me since then. The titular vacationers are a family from New York, who rent an identical isolated country cottage each year. On this occasion, in place of returning to urban life, they choose to extend their stay for a month longer – something that seems to disturb each resident in the surrounding community. All pass on the same veiled caution that not a soul has remained by the water after the end of summer. Regardless, the Allisons are resolved to stay, and that’s when things start to get increasingly weird. The man who brings the kerosene won’t sell to the couple. Not a single person is willing to supply food to the cabin, and as the Allisons try to go to the village, the car won’t start. A tempest builds, the energy in the radio die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people huddled together in their summer cottage and waited”. What might be this couple anticipating? What do the locals understand? Every time I peruse the writer’s chilling and thought-provoking story, I’m reminded that the finest fright originates in that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this brief tale two people journey to a typical coastal village in which chimes sound continuously, a constant chiming that is bothersome and unexplainable. The opening very scary scene happens at night, when they decide to take a walk and they can’t find the ocean. There’s sand, the scent exists of putrid marine life and seawater, there are waves, but the water is a ghost, or another thing and more dreadful. It is simply deeply malevolent and every time I go to the coast at night I recall this story that destroyed the sea at night to my mind – in a good way.

The recent spouses – she’s very young, the man is mature – return to the hotel and learn why the bells ring, through an extended episode of confinement, gruesome festivities and death-and-the-maiden intersects with danse macabre pandemonium. It’s a chilling meditation regarding craving and decline, two bodies aging together as spouses, the connection and aggression and gentleness of marriage.

Not merely the scariest, but perhaps among the finest short stories available, and a beloved choice. I read it en español, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to be published in Argentina a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this book by a pool overseas in 2020. Even with the bright weather I felt a chill over me. I also felt the thrill of excitement. I was writing my third novel, and I faced a wall. I didn’t know whether there existed any good way to write various frightening aspects the story includes. Going through this book, I realized that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a bleak exploration through the mind of a criminal, Quentin P, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who murdered and cut apart numerous individuals in the Midwest during a specific period. Infamously, Dahmer was obsessed with producing a compliant victim who would never leave him and attempted numerous macabre trials to achieve this.

The actions the story tells are appalling, but equally frightening is the mental realism. The character’s terrible, fragmented world is plainly told using minimal words, details omitted. The reader is plunged stuck in his mind, compelled to witness ideas and deeds that shock. The strangeness of his psyche feels like a bodily jolt – or being stranded in an empty realm. Going into this story feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I walked in my sleep and later started having night terrors. On one occasion, the horror included a dream in which I was stuck within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I found that I had removed a part out of the window frame, trying to get out. That building was decaying; during heavy rain the entranceway flooded, maggots fell from the ceiling onto the bed, and on one occasion a big rodent climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.

Once a companion handed me the story, I had moved out at my family home, but the story regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to myself, longing as I was. This is a book featuring a possessed noisy, sentimental building and a young woman who ingests chalk from the cliffs. I loved the story deeply and went back repeatedly to it, consistently uncovering {something