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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense

I read this tale some time back and it has haunted me ever since. The titular “summer people” turn out to be a family from the city, who lease the same off-grid rural cabin every summer. During this visit, rather than going back to urban life, they opt to extend their vacation a few more weeks – a decision that to unsettle all the locals in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that nobody has ever stayed at the lake past the holiday. Regardless, the couple are resolved to not leave, and at that point situations commence to grow more bizarre. The person who delivers the kerosene declines to provide to them. Not a single person agrees to bring groceries to their home, and as they endeavor to go to the village, their vehicle fails to start. A storm gathers, the energy within the device die, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals crowded closely in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What could be this couple waiting for? What might the residents know? Whenever I peruse Jackson’s chilling and thought-provoking narrative, I recall that the best horror originates in the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a couple go to a typical coastal village in which chimes sound continuously, a perpetual pealing that is annoying and unexplainable. The first extremely terrifying moment occurs at night, when they opt to take a walk and they can’t find the ocean. The beach is there, the scent exists of rotting fish and seawater, there are waves, but the water is a ghost, or a different entity and more dreadful. It is truly deeply malevolent and whenever I travel to the shore at night I remember this narrative which spoiled the ocean after dark to my mind – in a good way.

The recent spouses – she’s very young, the man is mature – return to the hotel and discover the cause of the ringing, during a prolonged scene of confinement, gruesome festivities and demise and innocence intersects with grim ballet pandemonium. It is a disturbing reflection regarding craving and decay, a pair of individuals maturing in tandem as partners, the attachment and violence and affection within wedlock.

Not just the most terrifying, but probably a top example of concise narratives in existence, and an individual preference. I read it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of this author’s works to be published in this country several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates

I read Zombie by a pool in France in 2020. Although it was sunny I experienced a chill through me. Additionally, I sensed the electricity of fascination. I was composing a new project, and I encountered an obstacle. I didn’t know whether there existed any good way to write certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Going through this book, I realized that it was possible.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a bleak exploration within the psyche of a young serial killer, the protagonist, based on an infamous individual, the criminal who killed and dismembered multiple victims in a city over a decade. As is well-known, Dahmer was fixated with producing a compliant victim that would remain with him and attempted numerous macabre trials to do so.

The deeds the book depicts are horrific, but similarly terrifying is its own mental realism. Quentin P’s awful, fragmented world is directly described with concise language, names redacted. The audience is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, obliged to witness mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The strangeness of his mind is like a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Starting this book feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from a gifted writer

During my youth, I walked in my sleep and subsequently commenced having night terrors. On one occasion, the terror involved a nightmare during which I was trapped in a box and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had removed a piece off the window, trying to get out. That home was decaying; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall flooded, fly larvae dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and at one time a large rat climbed the drapes in the bedroom.

After an acquaintance presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out at my family home, but the narrative regarding the building perched on the cliffs felt familiar to me, nostalgic as I felt. It’s a book featuring a possessed clamorous, emotional house and a female character who ingests calcium from the cliffs. I adored the novel deeply and went back again and again to it, each time discovering {something