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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense

I encountered this story years ago and it has lingered with me ever since. The titular vacationers turn out to be a couple urban dwellers, who occupy an identical isolated lakeside house each year. On this occasion, in place of heading back to urban life, they choose to lengthen their holiday for a month longer – a decision that to disturb everyone in the nearby town. All pass on a similar vague warning that nobody has lingered in the area past Labor Day. Regardless, they are resolved to not leave, and at that point things start to grow more bizarre. The man who delivers the kerosene refuses to sell to them. No one agrees to bring supplies to the cabin, and when they attempt to go to the village, the automobile won’t start. A tempest builds, the batteries within the device fade, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people huddled together within their rental and waited”. What could be this couple expecting? What do the townspeople know? Each occasion I read this author’s chilling and influential story, I recall that the top terror stems from the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a pair journey to a common beach community in which chimes sound constantly, an incessant ringing that is irritating and unexplainable. The initial truly frightening moment happens at night, as they opt to take a walk and they fail to see the sea. Sand is present, there is the odor of decaying seafood and salt, waves crash, but the sea appears spectral, or another thing and more dreadful. It is simply profoundly ominous and whenever I visit to a beach in the evening I recall this narrative that destroyed the sea at night in my view – positively.

The newlyweds – she’s very young, he’s not – return to the hotel and find out the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of confinement, macabre revelry and demise and innocence encounters dance of death chaos. It is a disturbing reflection regarding craving and deterioration, two people aging together as spouses, the attachment and violence and gentleness in matrimony.

Not just the most frightening, but perhaps one of the best short stories in existence, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of Aickman stories to be released in this country a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer

I read this book by a pool overseas in 2020. Despite the sunshine I sensed an icy feeling within me. I also experienced the electricity of excitement. I was composing a new project, and I encountered a block. I wasn’t sure if it was possible any good way to compose certain terrifying elements the book contains. Reading Zombie, I saw that there was a way.

Published in 1995, the novel is a grim journey into the thoughts of a criminal, the protagonist, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who killed and cut apart 17 young men and boys in the Midwest over a decade. As is well-known, Dahmer was fixated with creating a submissive individual who would never leave with him and made many macabre trials to accomplish it.

The deeds the book depicts are terrible, but similarly terrifying is its emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s terrible, shattered existence is directly described in spare prose, names redacted. The reader is plunged stuck in his mind, obliged to see ideas and deeds that horrify. The strangeness of his psyche feels like a tangible impact – or getting lost on a desolate planet. Entering Zombie is not just reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching from a gifted writer

In my early years, I sleepwalked and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the fear involved a vision during which I was stuck in a box and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had torn off a part off the window, trying to get out. That home was falling apart; when storms came the downstairs hall filled with water, maggots fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and at one time a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in my sister’s room.

Once a companion handed me the story, I had moved out at my family home, but the narrative about the home perched on the cliffs appeared known to me, nostalgic as I felt. It’s a book about a haunted noisy, emotional house and a young woman who eats chalk from the shoreline. I adored the book so much and came back again and again to its pages, consistently uncovering {something