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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson

I encountered this tale some time back and it has haunted me from that moment. The named “summer people” are a couple urban dwellers, who lease the same off-grid lakeside house each year. During this visit, instead of returning to the city, they decide to extend their stay a few more weeks – an action that appears to alarm everyone in the nearby town. Everyone conveys the same veiled caution that nobody has ever stayed at the lake beyond the holiday. Nonetheless, the couple are resolved to stay, and that’s when things start to grow more bizarre. The man who supplies oil refuses to sell to the couple. No one agrees to bring food to the cabin, and as the Allisons attempt to go to the village, their vehicle refuses to operate. A storm gathers, the power of their radio diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple clung to each other within their rental and waited”. What might be this couple expecting? What do the locals understand? Each occasion I peruse the writer’s disturbing and thought-provoking story, I recall that the finest fright comes from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a pair go to a typical coastal village where bells ring the whole time, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and puzzling. The opening extremely terrifying episode occurs during the evening, when they decide to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the water. Sand is present, the scent exists of rotting fish and brine, there are waves, but the water is a ghost, or a different entity and more dreadful. It is truly insanely sinister and each occasion I visit to the coast after dark I remember this narrative that ruined the ocean after dark in my view – positively.

The young couple – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – go back to their lodging and discover the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and death-and-the-maiden meets danse macabre chaos. It’s an unnerving contemplation regarding craving and deterioration, two people maturing in tandem as spouses, the attachment and violence and affection in matrimony.

Not just the most terrifying, but probably a top example of concise narratives in existence, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in Spanish, in the debut release of this author’s works to appear in Argentina several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from an esteemed writer

I perused Zombie by a pool in France a few years ago. Despite the sunshine I experienced an icy feeling within me. Additionally, I sensed the thrill of anticipation. I was writing my latest book, and I encountered an obstacle. I didn’t know if it was possible any good way to compose various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I understood that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a dark flight within the psyche of a murderer, the protagonist, based on an infamous individual, the murderer who slaughtered and cut apart 17 young men and boys in a city between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, this person was consumed with creating a zombie sex slave that would remain by his side and made many macabre trials to achieve this.

The actions the story tells are terrible, but just as scary is its psychological persuasiveness. The protagonist’s terrible, broken reality is simply narrated using minimal words, identities hidden. You is immersed trapped in his consciousness, forced to observe mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The strangeness of his mind resembles a physical shock – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Starting this book feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from a gifted writer

When I was a child, I sleepwalked and later started experiencing nightmares. On one occasion, the terror involved a dream in which I was confined within an enclosure and, as I roused, I discovered that I had removed the slat off the window, seeking to leave. That home was crumbling; during heavy rain the downstairs hall became inundated, insect eggs came down from the roof into the bedroom, and on one occasion a big rodent scaled the curtains in my sister’s room.

When a friend presented me with this author’s book, I was no longer living at my family home, but the narrative about the home perched on the cliffs appeared known to myself, nostalgic at that time. This is a book concerning a ghostly clamorous, emotional house and a girl who ingests limestone off the rocks. I loved the novel so much and went back repeatedly to it, consistently uncovering {something