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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense

I read this story long ago and it has stayed with me from that moment. The titular seasonal visitors happen to be the Allisons urban dwellers, who occupy the same isolated country cottage every summer. During this visit, in place of going back home, they opt to extend their stay for a month longer – a decision that to alarm all the locals in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that no one has remained by the water beyond Labor Day. Even so, the Allisons are determined to remain, and that’s when events begin to become stranger. The individual who supplies fuel declines to provide to them. Not a single person is willing to supply groceries to the cottage, and when they try to drive into town, their vehicle won’t start. A tempest builds, the energy of their radio diminish, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals huddled together inside their cabin and anticipated”. What are this couple anticipating? What do the townspeople know? Whenever I peruse the writer’s unnerving and thought-provoking story, I recall that the finest fright stems from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman

In this short story a pair go to a common coastal village where church bells toll constantly, an incessant ringing that is irritating and inexplicable. The first truly frightening episode takes place at night, when they decide to take a walk and they can’t find the sea. The beach is there, there is the odor of decaying seafood and salt, surf is audible, but the sea appears spectral, or something else and more dreadful. It is simply profoundly ominous and whenever I go to the shore at night I think about this story that destroyed the ocean after dark to my mind – in a good way.

The recent spouses – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – go back to the inn and find out the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and demise and innocence intersects with grim ballet chaos. It is a disturbing contemplation regarding craving and decline, two bodies growing old jointly as a couple, the attachment and aggression and affection within wedlock.

Not just the scariest, but perhaps a top example of concise narratives available, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of Aickman stories to appear in this country several years back.

Catriona Ward

Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into Zombie near the water in France a few years ago. Despite the sunshine I sensed cold creep within me. I also felt the excitement of anticipation. I was writing my third novel, and I had hit an obstacle. I didn’t know if it was possible any good way to compose certain terrifying elements the book contains. Reading Zombie, I realized that it was possible.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a bleak exploration into the thoughts of a murderer, the main character, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who killed and cut apart multiple victims in a city over a decade. As is well-known, this person was fixated with creating a zombie sex slave that would remain by his side and attempted numerous grisly attempts to do so.

The deeds the story tells are horrific, but equally frightening is the emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s terrible, fragmented world is directly described with concise language, names redacted. The reader is immersed trapped in his consciousness, compelled to see ideas and deeds that horrify. The alien nature of his thinking resembles a bodily jolt – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Going into Zombie is not just reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I sleepwalked and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. Once, the fear included a nightmare during which I was trapped in a box and, as I roused, I found that I had ripped a piece from the window, seeking to leave. That house was decaying; when storms came the downstairs hall flooded, insect eggs fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and on one occasion a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

When a friend handed me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out with my parents, but the narrative about the home high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to me, homesick as I was. It is a novel concerning a ghostly noisy, emotional house and a female character who eats chalk from the cliffs. I loved the novel deeply and came back frequently to it, each time discovering {something