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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by a master of suspense

I read this tale years ago and it has lingered with me since then. The named “summer people” are a family urban dwellers, who rent the same off-grid country cottage every summer. During this visit, in place of heading back home, they opt to prolong their stay for a month longer – an action that appears to unsettle everyone in the nearby town. Each repeats the same veiled caution that not a soul has ever stayed in the area beyond the end of summer. Regardless, the Allisons insist to not leave, and that’s when things start to become stranger. The person who supplies the kerosene refuses to sell to the couple. No one is willing to supply groceries to the cabin, and when they endeavor to drive into town, the automobile fails to start. A storm gathers, the batteries in the radio fade, and as darkness falls, “the two old people clung to each other within their rental and expected”. What could be they anticipating? What could the townspeople know? Every time I read the writer’s unnerving and inspiring narrative, I’m reminded that the best horror comes from that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes from a noted author

In this concise narrative a couple travel to a common seaside town where bells ring continuously, a constant chiming that is bothersome and inexplicable. The first extremely terrifying scene happens at night, at the time they opt to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the sea. There’s sand, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and brine, there are waves, but the sea seems phantom, or another thing and more dreadful. It is truly insanely sinister and every time I travel to a beach in the evening I think about this tale that ruined the ocean after dark for me – positively.

The young couple – the woman is adolescent, he’s not – return to their lodging and learn the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden intersects with danse macabre chaos. It’s an unnerving contemplation regarding craving and deterioration, a pair of individuals maturing in tandem as a couple, the attachment and violence and tenderness of marriage.

Not just the most terrifying, but likely one of the best concise narratives out there, and a beloved choice. I read it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of Aickman stories to appear in Argentina in 2011.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer

I read Zombie near the water overseas a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I experienced a chill through me. Additionally, I sensed the electricity of anticipation. I was working on my latest book, and I had hit an obstacle. I wasn’t sure if it was possible any good way to compose some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Going through this book, I understood that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the book is a dark flight into the thoughts of a young serial killer, Quentin P, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who killed and mutilated 17 young men and boys in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, this person was consumed with making a compliant victim who would never leave by his side and attempted numerous horrific efforts to achieve this.

The acts the book depicts are horrific, but just as scary is the psychological persuasiveness. The protagonist’s terrible, broken reality is simply narrated with concise language, identities hidden. You is immersed stuck in his mind, forced to see ideas and deeds that shock. The strangeness of his mind resembles a tangible impact – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Starting this story is less like reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and eventually began experiencing nightmares. On one occasion, the horror included a vision in which I was stuck within an enclosure and, upon awakening, I realized that I had removed the slat out of the window frame, attempting to escape. That home was crumbling; when storms came the downstairs hall filled with water, maggots fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and at one time a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in my sister’s room.

When a friend gave me this author’s book, I was no longer living with my parents, but the story regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs appeared known in my view, homesick at that time. It is a book about a haunted noisy, sentimental building and a girl who ingests limestone off the rocks. I cherished the novel so much and came back repeatedly to it, each time discovering {something