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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson

I encountered this narrative long ago and it has haunted me from that moment. The titular vacationers happen to be the Allisons from New York, who lease a particular remote country cottage each year. On this occasion, instead of returning home, they choose to extend their stay for a month longer – something that seems to unsettle everyone in the nearby town. All pass on the same veiled caution that no one has ever stayed in the area past the holiday. Regardless, the couple are determined to not leave, and that is the moment things start to grow more bizarre. The person who brings the kerosene declines to provide to them. Not a single person will deliver food to the cottage, and when the Allisons attempt to drive into town, their vehicle won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the batteries of their radio die, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals crowded closely within their rental and waited”. What could be they waiting for? What could the residents know? Each occasion I revisit Jackson’s disturbing and influential narrative, I recall that the finest fright originates in what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by a noted author

In this brief tale two people go to an ordinary beach community where bells ring the whole time, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and puzzling. The opening truly frightening scene occurs after dark, at the time they opt to take a walk and they can’t find the sea. There’s sand, there is the odor of rotting fish and seawater, surf is audible, but the water seems phantom, or a different entity and more dreadful. It’s just deeply malevolent and each occasion I travel to the coast after dark I think about this tale which spoiled the beach in the evening in my view – in a good way.

The recent spouses – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – return to their lodging and learn the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and demise and innocence encounters dance of death bedlam. It is a disturbing contemplation on desire and decay, two people aging together as partners, the bond and violence and gentleness in matrimony.

Not just the scariest, but likely a top example of short stories available, and an individual preference. I encountered it in Spanish, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to appear in Argentina several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into Zombie by a pool in the French countryside in 2020. Even with the bright weather I sensed a chill within me. I also felt the thrill of fascination. I was writing my latest book, and I had hit a wall. I didn’t know if there was a proper method to craft certain terrifying elements the book contains. Going through this book, I realized that it could be done.

Released decades ago, the book is a bleak exploration into the thoughts of a criminal, the main character, inspired by a notorious figure, the criminal who slaughtered and cut apart numerous individuals in a city between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, this person was obsessed with making a compliant victim that would remain with him and attempted numerous macabre trials to achieve this.

The deeds the novel describes are terrible, but similarly terrifying is the psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s awful, broken reality is simply narrated with concise language, identities hidden. You is plunged trapped in his consciousness, compelled to observe ideas and deeds that horrify. The alien nature of his psyche is like a tangible impact – or finding oneself isolated on a desolate planet. Going into Zombie feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

In my early years, I walked in my sleep and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. Once, the horror involved a dream during which I was confined within an enclosure and, upon awakening, I realized that I had ripped a piece off the window, attempting to escape. That home was falling apart; during heavy rain the ground floor corridor filled with water, maggots fell from the ceiling onto the bed, and at one time a large rat ascended the window coverings in the bedroom.

When a friend handed me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living at my family home, but the tale of the house perched on the cliffs appeared known in my view, homesick at that time. It’s a novel featuring a possessed loud, emotional house and a girl who ingests calcium from the shoreline. I cherished the novel deeply and returned again and again to its pages, always finding {something