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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I read this story long ago and it has lingered with me since then. The titular vacationers turn out to be a couple urban dwellers, who occupy a particular remote rural cabin each year. During this visit, instead of heading back home, they choose to extend their vacation an extra month – something that seems to alarm everyone in the surrounding community. Each repeats a similar vague warning that no one has lingered at the lake beyond Labor Day. Even so, they insist to remain, and at that point situations commence to get increasingly weird. The man who supplies fuel refuses to sell to them. Nobody will deliver supplies to the cabin, and as the Allisons attempt to go to the village, the car fails to start. A storm gathers, the energy of their radio diminish, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple clung to each other inside their cabin and expected”. What might be they waiting for? What do the townspeople understand? Whenever I read this author’s chilling and influential narrative, I remember that the best horror stems from what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this short story a couple journey to an ordinary beach community where bells ring continuously, a constant chiming that is irritating and inexplicable. The initial extremely terrifying episode takes place after dark, at the time they opt to take a walk and they can’t find the water. There’s sand, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and seawater, waves crash, but the water appears spectral, or another thing and even more alarming. It is simply insanely sinister and every time I travel to the shore after dark I remember this story that ruined the ocean after dark to my mind – favorably.

The newlyweds – she’s very young, the man is mature – go back to the inn and find out the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of confinement, macabre revelry and mortality and youth encounters grim ballet bedlam. It’s a chilling reflection about longing and decay, two bodies maturing in tandem as partners, the attachment and violence and gentleness of marriage.

Not just the most terrifying, but likely among the finest short stories out there, and an individual preference. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of this author’s works to be published in Argentina in 2011.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer

I delved into this narrative near the water overseas recently. Although it was sunny I sensed an icy feeling within me. I also experienced the electricity of excitement. I was composing my latest book, and I faced an obstacle. I was uncertain if it was possible any good way to compose various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Going through this book, I saw that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a dark flight into the thoughts of a young serial killer, Quentin P, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who slaughtered and cut apart multiple victims in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, this person was obsessed with producing a zombie sex slave that would remain by his side and attempted numerous grisly attempts to achieve this.

The deeds the story tells are appalling, but similarly terrifying is its emotional authenticity. Quentin P’s terrible, fragmented world is directly described in spare prose, identities hidden. The reader is plunged stuck in his mind, compelled to witness ideas and deeds that appal. The strangeness of his psyche resembles a tangible impact – or getting lost in an empty realm. Starting this story feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by a gifted writer

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and subsequently commenced experiencing nightmares. Once, the fear involved a nightmare where I was confined in a box and, when I woke up, I found that I had ripped the slat from the window, trying to get out. That building was crumbling; when storms came the downstairs hall filled with water, insect eggs fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and at one time a large rat scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

Once a companion handed me this author’s book, I had moved out with my parents, but the story of the house located on the coastline seemed recognizable to myself, nostalgic as I felt. It’s a novel featuring a possessed loud, sentimental building and a female character who ingests chalk from the shoreline. I loved the novel so much and came back frequently to its pages, always finding {something