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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I discovered this narrative long ago and it has lingered with me ever since. The titular vacationers turn out to be a family urban dwellers, who occupy a particular isolated rural cabin each year. This time, instead of returning to urban life, they choose to prolong their holiday for a month longer – an action that appears to alarm all the locals in the nearby town. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that no one has lingered by the water beyond the end of summer. Nonetheless, they are resolved to stay, and that’s when things start to get increasingly weird. The man who brings the kerosene won’t sell for them. No one agrees to bring food to their home, and when the Allisons try to travel to the community, the automobile won’t start. A storm gathers, the power of their radio diminish, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals crowded closely within their rental and anticipated”. What might be the Allisons expecting? What could the townspeople be aware of? Whenever I peruse Jackson’s chilling and thought-provoking tale, I’m reminded that the finest fright originates in that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes from a noted author

In this brief tale a couple travel to a typical beach community where church bells toll the whole time, an incessant ringing that is irritating and inexplicable. The first very scary scene occurs after dark, as they choose to take a walk and they can’t find the sea. The beach is there, there is the odor of rotting fish and brine, there are waves, but the sea appears spectral, or a different entity and more dreadful. It’s just deeply malevolent and whenever I travel to a beach at night I remember this story that ruined the sea at night to my mind – positively.

The newlyweds – she’s very young, he’s not – head back to the inn and learn why the bells ring, in a long sequence of confinement, necro-orgy and death-and-the-maiden encounters danse macabre pandemonium. It is a disturbing reflection on desire and decline, a pair of individuals growing old jointly as partners, the connection and aggression and affection of marriage.

Not merely the most terrifying, but perhaps among the finest brief tales out there, and a beloved choice. I read it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of Aickman stories to be published in this country several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this book near the water in the French countryside in 2020. Although it was sunny I experienced an icy feeling within me. I also experienced the electricity of anticipation. I was working on a new project, and I encountered a block. I didn’t know whether there existed any good way to compose certain terrifying elements the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I understood that it could be done.

Released decades ago, the novel is a grim journey into the thoughts of a criminal, the protagonist, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who killed and dismembered multiple victims in a city between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, the killer was fixated with creating a submissive individual that would remain with him and carried out several grisly attempts to do so.

The acts the book depicts are appalling, but just as scary is its own psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s awful, fragmented world is plainly told using minimal words, names redacted. You is immersed trapped in his consciousness, forced to see mental processes and behaviors that shock. The alien nature of his psyche is like a tangible impact – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Entering this book feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from a gifted writer

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and eventually began having night terrors. Once, the fear featured a nightmare during which I was trapped in a box and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had torn off a piece out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That house was crumbling; when it rained heavily the ground floor corridor flooded, insect eggs fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and once a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in the bedroom.

After an acquaintance presented me with the story, I had moved out with my parents, but the tale regarding the building located on the coastline felt familiar to myself, homesick as I was. This is a novel featuring a possessed clamorous, sentimental building and a young woman who ingests chalk from the shoreline. I adored the book so much and went back again and again to its pages, always finding {something