Andrew Michael Hurley
The Summer People by a master of suspense
I discovered this story long ago and it has lingered with me ever since. The titular “summer people” turn out to be a family from New York, who occupy the same remote rural cabin every summer. On this occasion, in place of going back to urban life, they choose to prolong their vacation a few more weeks – something that seems to disturb all the locals in the surrounding community. All pass on a similar vague warning that no one has lingered at the lake beyond the end of summer. Nonetheless, they are determined to stay, and at that point events begin to become stranger. The man who delivers oil refuses to sell for them. Not a single person agrees to bring groceries to their home, and at the time they try to drive into town, the automobile refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the energy of their radio die, and as darkness falls, “the two old people crowded closely within their rental and anticipated”. What are this couple anticipating? What could the residents be aware of? Whenever I read Jackson’s chilling and influential tale, I’m reminded that the best horror comes from what’s left undisclosed.
An Acclaimed Writer
Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman
In this short story a pair journey to an ordinary seaside town where church bells toll continuously, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and inexplicable. The initial very scary episode takes place at night, as they choose to take a walk and they are unable to locate the ocean. The beach is there, there’s the smell of rotting fish and brine, surf is audible, but the ocean is a ghost, or a different entity and even more alarming. It is truly deeply malevolent and whenever I visit to the coast in the evening I think about this narrative that destroyed the ocean after dark to my mind – favorably.
The recent spouses – she’s very young, the husband is older – return to the hotel and learn the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, necro-orgy and mortality and youth intersects with dance of death chaos. It’s an unnerving contemplation regarding craving and decay, two bodies growing old jointly as partners, the attachment and violence and affection within wedlock.
Not only the scariest, but likely among the finest short stories in existence, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to be published in Argentina in 2011.
A Prominent Novelist
Zombie by an esteemed writer
I delved into this book beside the swimming area in the French countryside in 2020. Even with the bright weather I felt a chill over me. I also experienced the excitement of excitement. I was working on a new project, and I encountered a block. I was uncertain whether there existed a proper method to write certain terrifying elements the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I saw that there was a way.
First printed in the nineties, the story is a bleak exploration within the psyche of a young serial killer, the main character, modeled after a notorious figure, the murderer who murdered and mutilated 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, the killer was consumed with creating a compliant victim who would stay with him and attempted numerous horrific efforts to accomplish it.
The actions the story tells are terrible, but similarly terrifying is the mental realism. Quentin P’s awful, shattered existence is directly described with concise language, names redacted. The reader is plunged stuck in his mind, obliged to observe mental processes and behaviors that appal. The foreignness of his mind feels like a physical shock – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Starting this book feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.
An Accomplished Author
A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi
In my early years, I was a somnambulist and eventually began experiencing nightmares. At one point, the terror involved a dream during which I was confined within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had removed a piece off the window, trying to get out. That building was decaying; when storms came the entranceway filled with water, maggots dropped from above onto the bed, and on one occasion a large rat climbed the drapes in the bedroom.
Once a companion gave me the story, I had moved out at my family home, but the tale about the home perched on the cliffs felt familiar to me, longing as I was. It’s a novel featuring a possessed clamorous, atmospheric home and a young woman who ingests calcium off the rocks. I adored the book so much and went back frequently to the story, each time discovering {something
