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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from a master of suspense

I encountered this narrative long ago and it has lingered with me from that moment. The so-called seasonal visitors happen to be the Allisons urban dwellers, who rent the same isolated lakeside house annually. During this visit, in place of going back to the city, they opt to lengthen their stay an extra month – an action that appears to unsettle each resident in the surrounding community. All pass on an identical cryptic advice that nobody has lingered by the water past Labor Day. Regardless, the Allisons insist to stay, and that’s when events begin to get increasingly weird. The person who supplies the kerosene refuses to sell for them. Nobody is willing to supply groceries to the cottage, and as the family try to travel to the community, their vehicle won’t start. A storm gathers, the batteries of their radio diminish, and when night comes, “the elderly couple huddled together within their rental and anticipated”. What could be they expecting? What could the locals understand? Every time I peruse this author’s unnerving and thought-provoking narrative, I remember that the top terror stems from the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from a noted author

In this concise narrative a couple go to a common coastal village where bells ring the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and unexplainable. The first truly frightening episode occurs during the evening, when they choose to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the ocean. Sand is present, the scent exists of rotting fish and salt, waves crash, but the water seems phantom, or another thing and worse. It is truly insanely sinister and whenever I visit to the coast after dark I think about this tale which spoiled the ocean after dark in my view – in a good way.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – go back to the hotel and learn why the bells ring, during a prolonged scene of confinement, macabre revelry and demise and innocence intersects with grim ballet bedlam. It is a disturbing meditation on desire and decay, two bodies growing old jointly as partners, the attachment and violence and affection in matrimony.

Not only the scariest, but perhaps a top example of concise narratives available, and an individual preference. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of these tales to appear in Argentina a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates

I read Zombie near the water in France recently. Even with the bright weather I experienced a chill within me. I also felt the thrill of fascination. I was composing my latest book, and I faced an obstacle. I didn’t know if there was any good way to compose certain terrifying elements the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I understood that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a dark flight through the mind of a criminal, the main character, modeled after a notorious figure, the criminal who murdered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in the Midwest over a decade. As is well-known, Dahmer was obsessed with producing a zombie sex slave that would remain by his side and made many horrific efforts to accomplish it.

The acts the book depicts are terrible, but just as scary is the emotional authenticity. The character’s terrible, fragmented world is plainly told in spare prose, identities hidden. You is immersed caught in his thoughts, obliged to witness thoughts and actions that horrify. The strangeness of his mind is like a tangible impact – or getting lost in an empty realm. Going into this story is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and later started experiencing nightmares. At one point, the fear involved a dream in which I was trapped in a box and, as I roused, I discovered that I had removed a part out of the window frame, trying to get out. That home was falling apart; during heavy rain the entranceway filled with water, insect eggs dropped from above onto the bed, and once a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in that space.

When a friend presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out with my parents, but the story about the home high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable in my view, homesick as I felt. It’s a book about a haunted noisy, emotional house and a female character who consumes chalk from the cliffs. I loved the story so much and went back frequently to it, each time discovering {something