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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson

I discovered this narrative years ago and it has lingered with me from that moment. The so-called vacationers turn out to be the Allisons urban dwellers, who lease a particular off-grid rural cabin every summer. On this occasion, rather than heading back to the city, they choose to prolong their holiday an extra month – an action that appears to unsettle everyone in the nearby town. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that no one has ever stayed at the lake after the holiday. Nonetheless, they are determined to remain, and at that point events begin to grow more bizarre. The man who brings oil won’t sell for them. Nobody is willing to supply groceries to their home, and as they endeavor to travel to the community, the car fails to start. A storm gathers, the energy in the radio fade, and when night comes, “the two old people huddled together within their rental and anticipated”. What could be they anticipating? What could the townspeople know? Each occasion I revisit Jackson’s chilling and thought-provoking story, I remember that the top terror comes from what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this short story a couple travel to a typical coastal village in which chimes sound continuously, a constant chiming that is annoying and unexplainable. The first truly frightening scene happens during the evening, at the time they opt to take a walk and they can’t find the sea. Sand is present, there’s the smell of rotting fish and brine, waves crash, but the sea seems phantom, or something else and even more alarming. It is truly insanely sinister and every time I go to the coast after dark I recall this tale that destroyed the sea at night to my mind – positively.

The recent spouses – the wife is youthful, he’s not – head back to the hotel and find out the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, necro-orgy and death-and-the-maiden encounters dance of death bedlam. It’s an unnerving reflection on desire and decay, two bodies aging together as spouses, the bond and violence and tenderness in matrimony.

Not only the most frightening, but likely a top example of short stories available, and a beloved choice. I read it in Spanish, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to be published locally in 2011.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this book by a pool overseas in 2020. Despite the sunshine I experienced a chill over me. I also felt the electricity of fascination. I was writing a new project, and I encountered a block. I wasn’t sure whether there existed a proper method to craft some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Going through this book, I saw that it could be done.

Published in 1995, the book is a bleak exploration through the mind of a young serial killer, the main character, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who murdered and mutilated numerous individuals in a city during a specific period. Infamously, this person was obsessed with creating a zombie sex slave that would remain by his side and carried out several grisly attempts to accomplish it.

The actions the novel describes are horrific, but similarly terrifying is the emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s awful, shattered existence is simply narrated with concise language, details omitted. You is immersed stuck in his mind, forced to observe mental processes and behaviors that shock. The strangeness of his thinking is like a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Starting this book is not just reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the fear featured a vision during which I was confined in a box and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had ripped a piece out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That home was decaying; when storms came the ground floor corridor flooded, insect eggs came down from the roof into the bedroom, and once a large rat climbed the drapes in the bedroom.

When a friend presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living at my family home, but the narrative regarding the building located on the coastline seemed recognizable to me, homesick as I felt. It’s a book featuring a possessed loud, emotional house and a girl who ingests chalk from the cliffs. I loved the book immensely and returned again and again to its pages, always finding {something