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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I discovered this tale years ago and it has haunted me since then. The so-called vacationers happen to be a couple from the city, who lease the same off-grid country cottage annually. On this occasion, rather than going back to the city, they opt to extend their vacation a few more weeks – a decision that to alarm each resident in the adjacent village. All pass on an identical cryptic advice that nobody has ever stayed at the lake beyond Labor Day. Nonetheless, the Allisons insist to stay, and at that point events begin to get increasingly weird. The person who brings oil won’t sell to them. Nobody is willing to supply food to the cabin, and at the time they attempt to drive into town, their vehicle fails to start. A storm gathers, the energy within the device die, and as darkness falls, “the two old people clung to each other inside their cabin and anticipated”. What are this couple anticipating? What do the locals be aware of? Whenever I peruse Jackson’s unnerving and inspiring story, I’m reminded that the finest fright originates in that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by a noted author

In this short story two people go to a typical beach community where church bells toll the whole time, a constant chiming that is bothersome and inexplicable. The first very scary scene happens after dark, at the time they decide to walk around and they are unable to locate the sea. The beach is there, the scent exists of putrid marine life and brine, waves crash, but the ocean seems phantom, or another thing and more dreadful. It’s just profoundly ominous and each occasion I go to the shore at night I think about this narrative which spoiled the sea at night to my mind – in a good way.

The young couple – she’s very young, the man is mature – head back to their lodging and discover the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, necro-orgy and demise and innocence meets dance of death pandemonium. It is a disturbing contemplation on desire and decline, two people growing old jointly as spouses, the attachment and aggression and tenderness in matrimony.

Not only the most terrifying, but probably among the finest concise narratives out there, and an individual preference. I experienced it in Spanish, in the first edition of these tales to be released in Argentina several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this book by a pool in the French countryside a few years ago. Although it was sunny I sensed cold creep over me. I also experienced the excitement of fascination. I was writing my latest book, and I encountered an obstacle. I wasn’t sure whether there existed a proper method to craft some of the fearful things the story includes. Going through this book, I realized that there was a way.

Released decades ago, the book is a grim journey through the mind of a murderer, the main character, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who slaughtered and mutilated numerous individuals in the Midwest over a decade. Notoriously, Dahmer was consumed with producing a submissive individual that would remain with him and made many horrific efforts to accomplish it.

The actions the story tells are terrible, but similarly terrifying is its own psychological persuasiveness. The character’s terrible, fragmented world is plainly told using minimal words, identities hidden. You is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, forced to witness thoughts and actions that appal. The alien nature of his mind resembles a physical shock – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Entering this story is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced having night terrors. On one occasion, the horror involved a nightmare in which I was stuck inside a container and, upon awakening, I realized that I had torn off the slat from the window, trying to get out. That home was falling apart; during heavy rain the ground floor corridor flooded, fly larvae fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and once a large rat ascended the window coverings in my sister’s room.

When a friend presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out in my childhood residence, but the story regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to me, nostalgic at that time. It’s a novel concerning a ghostly noisy, sentimental building and a young woman who ingests chalk from the cliffs. I cherished the story deeply and came back again and again to the story, consistently uncovering {something