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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson

I discovered this tale years ago and it has haunted me ever since. The titular “summer people” turn out to be the Allisons urban dwellers, who rent a particular off-grid rural cabin annually. During this visit, in place of returning home, they choose to prolong their vacation a few more weeks – an action that appears to unsettle all the locals in the adjacent village. All pass on a similar vague warning that nobody has ever stayed at the lake past the holiday. Even so, the couple insist to stay, and that is the moment things start to become stranger. The person who delivers fuel declines to provide to them. No one agrees to bring food to the cottage, and as the family attempt to travel to the community, their vehicle refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the batteries of their radio diminish, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals huddled together in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What might be the Allisons anticipating? What do the residents be aware of? Every time I read Jackson’s disturbing and inspiring tale, I recall that the best horror originates in the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by a noted author

In this brief tale two people go to a common beach community in which chimes sound continuously, a perpetual pealing that is irritating and puzzling. The first truly frightening episode takes place during the evening, when they opt to walk around and they fail to see the sea. Sand is present, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and salt, waves crash, but the sea is a ghost, or a different entity and more dreadful. It is simply insanely sinister and every time I visit to a beach in the evening I remember this story that destroyed the beach in the evening in my view – in a good way.

The newlyweds – the woman is adolescent, the husband is older – return to their lodging and learn why the bells ring, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and death-and-the-maiden encounters danse macabre pandemonium. It’s a chilling reflection regarding craving and decline, two bodies aging together as spouses, the bond and aggression and affection in matrimony.

Not only the most terrifying, but probably among the finest short stories in existence, and a beloved choice. I read it in Spanish, in the initial publication of these tales to be published locally several years back.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I perused Zombie beside the swimming area in the French countryside in 2020. Despite the sunshine I sensed cold creep through me. I also felt the excitement of fascination. I was composing my third novel, and I faced an obstacle. I was uncertain whether there existed any good way to craft certain terrifying elements the book contains. Reading Zombie, I saw that it could be done.

Published in 1995, the book is a dark flight through the mind of a young serial killer, the protagonist, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who murdered and mutilated 17 young men and boys in the Midwest during a specific period. Notoriously, Dahmer was fixated with creating a compliant victim that would remain by his side and made many grisly attempts to do so.

The deeds the novel describes are terrible, but just as scary is its emotional authenticity. Quentin P’s awful, broken reality is directly described with concise language, details omitted. The reader is plunged caught in his thoughts, forced to see thoughts and actions that horrify. The foreignness of his thinking is like a bodily jolt – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Going into Zombie is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and subsequently commenced suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the horror included a dream in which I was confined within an enclosure and, as I roused, I realized that I had ripped the slat from the window, attempting to escape. That house was crumbling; when storms came the entranceway filled with water, fly larvae fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and on one occasion a big rodent ascended the window coverings in the bedroom.

After an acquaintance gave me the story, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the tale regarding the building perched on the cliffs appeared known to me, longing at that time. This is a book about a haunted clamorous, sentimental building and a female character who consumes calcium from the cliffs. I loved the story so much and returned again and again to it, each time discovering {something