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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from a master of suspense

I read this tale long ago and it has haunted me ever since. The so-called seasonal visitors are the Allisons from the city, who rent the same remote lakeside house every summer. During this visit, instead of going back to the city, they choose to prolong their holiday a few more weeks – something that seems to unsettle all the locals in the nearby town. Each repeats a similar vague warning that nobody has lingered by the water past the end of summer. Even so, they are determined to remain, and that’s when events begin to become stranger. The individual who supplies fuel refuses to sell for them. Not a single person agrees to bring groceries to the cabin, and when they endeavor to drive into town, their vehicle won’t start. A tempest builds, the energy within the device die, and when night comes, “the two old people huddled together inside their cabin and expected”. What are the Allisons anticipating? What might the townspeople know? Whenever I revisit Jackson’s chilling and inspiring story, I recall that the best horror comes from what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by a noted author

In this brief tale two people go to an ordinary seaside town in which chimes sound constantly, a constant chiming that is bothersome and puzzling. The initial truly frightening scene takes place during the evening, as they decide to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the sea. There’s sand, there is the odor of rotting fish and salt, waves crash, but the ocean seems phantom, or something else and worse. It is truly deeply malevolent and every time I go to the shore in the evening I recall this narrative that destroyed the ocean after dark in my view – positively.

The recent spouses – she’s very young, the man is mature – head back to their lodging and find out the reason for the chiming, during a prolonged scene of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and demise and innocence encounters dance of death bedlam. It’s a chilling meditation regarding craving and decay, two people aging together as a couple, the bond and aggression and tenderness within wedlock.

Not only the scariest, but perhaps a top example of short stories in existence, and a beloved choice. I experienced it in Spanish, in the initial publication of this author’s works to appear locally a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I perused Zombie by a pool in the French countryside recently. Even with the bright weather I sensed cold creep within me. I also felt the electricity of excitement. I was working on my third novel, and I encountered an obstacle. I didn’t know whether there existed a proper method to write some of the fearful things the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I understood that it could be done.

Released decades ago, the book is a dark flight through the mind of a criminal, the main character, based on an infamous individual, the murderer who slaughtered and cut apart multiple victims in a city over a decade. Infamously, this person was consumed with producing a compliant victim who would never leave with him and made many horrific efforts to do so.

The deeds the novel describes are horrific, but just as scary is its mental realism. The character’s awful, shattered existence is plainly told using minimal words, details omitted. The reader is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, obliged to observe mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The foreignness of his thinking resembles a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Starting this book feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

When I was a child, I sleepwalked and later started having night terrors. At one point, the fear involved a vision in which I was trapped within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I realized that I had removed a part from the window, seeking to leave. That building was crumbling; during heavy rain the downstairs hall became inundated, maggots dropped from above into the bedroom, and once a big rodent scaled the curtains in that space.

When a friend handed me the story, I had moved out at my family home, but the narrative of the house high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable in my view, longing as I felt. It is a book concerning a ghostly clamorous, sentimental building and a young woman who ingests calcium from the shoreline. I adored the novel so much and went back repeatedly to the story, each time discovering {something