🔗 Share this article

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I encountered this story years ago and it has lingered with me from that moment. The so-called seasonal visitors are the Allisons from New York, who lease the same isolated lakeside house each year. During this visit, in place of returning to urban life, they choose to prolong their vacation an extra month – an action that appears to alarm each resident in the nearby town. All pass on the same veiled caution that not a soul has remained by the water past the holiday. Even so, the Allisons are determined to stay, and that is the moment things start to grow more bizarre. The individual who brings oil declines to provide to them. Nobody will deliver groceries to the cottage, and at the time they try to go to the village, their vehicle refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the power of their radio fade, and when night comes, “the elderly couple clung to each other in their summer cottage and waited”. What might be this couple waiting for? What might the residents understand? Whenever I revisit this author’s chilling and influential story, I’m reminded that the finest fright stems from the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this short story a couple travel to a typical beach community where church bells toll constantly, a constant chiming that is bothersome and inexplicable. The first extremely terrifying episode occurs during the evening, as they decide to take a walk and they can’t find the water. There’s sand, the scent exists of putrid marine life and salt, there are waves, but the water is a ghost, or another thing and even more alarming. It is truly deeply malevolent and every time I visit to the shore at night I recall this narrative that destroyed the beach in the evening in my view – positively.

The recent spouses – she’s very young, he’s not – head back to the hotel and find out the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of confinement, gruesome festivities and death-and-the-maiden encounters grim ballet pandemonium. It’s a chilling reflection on desire and decline, two people aging together as a couple, the attachment and brutality and affection of marriage.

Not just the most terrifying, but perhaps among the finest short stories available, and a beloved choice. I read it en español, in the debut release of this author’s works to appear in this country a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I delved into this book by a pool overseas in 2020. Despite the sunshine I experienced cold creep over me. Additionally, I sensed the thrill of fascination. I was composing my third novel, and I faced a wall. I didn’t know if it was possible an effective approach to write some of the fearful things the book contains. Experiencing this novel, I realized that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a dark flight within the psyche of a young serial killer, the protagonist, inspired by an infamous individual, the criminal who killed and dismembered 17 young men and boys in a city between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, this person was fixated with producing a zombie sex slave who would never leave with him and attempted numerous macabre trials to accomplish it.

The actions the story tells are appalling, but similarly terrifying is its own mental realism. The character’s terrible, broken reality is directly described with concise language, names redacted. The reader is immersed stuck in his mind, obliged to observe ideas and deeds that shock. The strangeness of his psyche feels like a bodily jolt – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Starting this book feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and later started suffering from bad dreams. Once, the terror included a dream in which I was confined within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I realized that I had ripped the slat out of the window frame, trying to get out. That home was falling apart; during heavy rain the entranceway filled with water, fly larvae fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and at one time a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in my sister’s room.

After an acquaintance handed me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living at my family home, but the tale about the home located on the coastline seemed recognizable in my view, nostalgic as I was. This is a novel featuring a possessed noisy, sentimental building and a female character who eats limestone from the cliffs. I adored the story deeply and went back repeatedly to its pages, each time discovering {something