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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I discovered this narrative years ago and it has haunted me ever since. The titular seasonal visitors are a couple from the city, who lease a particular remote country cottage annually. During this visit, in place of returning to the city, they choose to lengthen their stay an extra month – something that seems to disturb everyone in the adjacent village. Each repeats a similar vague warning that nobody has ever stayed by the water past the holiday. Regardless, they insist to not leave, and that is the moment things start to become stranger. The man who brings oil won’t sell to them. No one agrees to bring groceries to their home, and as the family try to go to the village, the car won’t start. A tempest builds, the batteries in the radio diminish, and when night comes, “the two old people huddled together inside their cabin and waited”. What might be they anticipating? What could the locals understand? Whenever I read the writer’s disturbing and influential narrative, I remember that the finest fright comes from what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a pair journey to a common coastal village where bells ring constantly, a constant chiming that is bothersome and unexplainable. The initial truly frightening episode happens during the evening, as they opt to take a walk and they can’t find the water. There’s sand, the scent exists of rotting fish and seawater, surf is audible, but the water seems phantom, or another thing and even more alarming. It’s just profoundly ominous and each occasion I visit to the coast at night I remember this story that destroyed the sea at night to my mind – in a good way.

The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, he’s not – go back to the inn and learn the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of confinement, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden meets dance of death bedlam. It’s a chilling meditation about longing and decay, two people aging together as spouses, the connection and brutality and tenderness of marriage.

Not merely the most terrifying, but perhaps among the finest short stories in existence, and a beloved choice. I experienced it en español, in the debut release of this author’s works to be released locally a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this book near the water overseas recently. Even with the bright weather I felt a chill within me. I also experienced the thrill of anticipation. I was composing a new project, and I faced a wall. I was uncertain whether there existed an effective approach to craft some of the fearful things the book contains. Reading Zombie, I saw that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a dark flight through the mind of a criminal, the protagonist, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who murdered and dismembered numerous individuals in the Midwest over a decade. Notoriously, the killer was obsessed with producing a compliant victim who would stay by his side and attempted numerous grisly attempts to accomplish it.

The deeds the novel describes are appalling, but just as scary is its own psychological persuasiveness. The character’s dreadful, shattered existence is directly described with concise language, names redacted. The reader is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, compelled to observe thoughts and actions that horrify. The foreignness of his thinking is like a tangible impact – or getting lost in an empty realm. Starting this story is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching from a gifted writer

When I was a child, I sleepwalked and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. Once, the terror involved a nightmare in which I was confined inside a container and, when I woke up, I found that I had ripped a piece off the window, seeking to leave. That building was crumbling; when storms came the ground floor corridor flooded, insect eggs fell from the ceiling on to my parents’ bed, and once a large rat scaled the curtains in my sister’s room.

After an acquaintance gave me the story, I was no longer living in my childhood residence, but the story about the home high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to me, longing as I felt. It’s a novel featuring a possessed loud, sentimental building and a female character who eats chalk off the rocks. I loved the story so much and came back frequently to it, each time discovering {something