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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson

I discovered this story some time back and it has lingered with me since then. The named vacationers are the Allisons from New York, who rent an identical remote country cottage annually. This time, in place of going back to the city, they opt to prolong their holiday for a month longer – an action that appears to disturb everyone in the adjacent village. Each repeats an identical cryptic advice that nobody has lingered in the area past the end of summer. Even so, the couple are determined to not leave, and that’s when situations commence to grow more bizarre. The individual who delivers the kerosene declines to provide to the couple. Not a single person agrees to bring groceries to the cabin, and as the family attempt to go to the village, the automobile refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the batteries of their radio diminish, and when night comes, “the aged individuals huddled together inside their cabin and anticipated”. What might be this couple expecting? What could the townspeople understand? Whenever I revisit the writer’s chilling and influential narrative, I recall that the best horror comes from that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from a noted author

In this concise narrative a couple journey to a typical beach community in which chimes sound continuously, a constant chiming that is bothersome and unexplainable. The first truly frightening moment takes place after dark, at the time they opt to go for a stroll and they fail to see the sea. The beach is there, the scent exists of decaying seafood and brine, waves crash, but the water seems phantom, or a different entity and more dreadful. It is truly insanely sinister and every time I go to the coast in the evening I think about this narrative that destroyed the sea at night in my view – favorably.

The young couple – she’s very young, the man is mature – go back to the hotel and discover the cause of the ringing, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth intersects with dance of death chaos. It’s an unnerving meditation on desire and deterioration, two bodies aging together as spouses, the bond and aggression and affection in matrimony.

Not just the most frightening, but probably a top example of short stories in existence, and a beloved choice. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of this author’s works to appear in this country a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this book near the water in the French countryside a few years ago. Although it was sunny I felt a chill within me. I also experienced the thrill of excitement. I was working on my third novel, and I had hit a wall. I wasn’t sure if there was a proper method to write certain terrifying elements the book contains. Going through this book, I understood that it was possible.

Published in 1995, the story is a dark flight through the mind of a murderer, the main character, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who murdered and cut apart 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee over a decade. Notoriously, the killer was obsessed with producing a compliant victim that would remain with him and made many grisly attempts to do so.

The actions the book depicts are terrible, but similarly terrifying is the emotional authenticity. Quentin P’s awful, broken reality is simply narrated with concise language, names redacted. The reader is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, compelled to witness ideas and deeds that appal. The foreignness of his psyche resembles a bodily jolt – or getting lost on a desolate planet. Going into this book feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I sleepwalked and later started having night terrors. At one point, the terror involved a nightmare where I was stuck in a box and, as I roused, I found that I had torn off the slat off the window, seeking to leave. That house was decaying; during heavy rain the entranceway became inundated, insect eggs came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and at one time a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in my sister’s room.

When a friend handed me the story, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the story regarding the building perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable to me, nostalgic as I was. This is a novel featuring a possessed loud, emotional house and a female character who eats calcium from the cliffs. I loved the story deeply and went back repeatedly to the story, consistently uncovering {something