🔗 Share this article

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense

I encountered this tale long ago and it has haunted me since then. The named seasonal visitors are a family from the city, who lease the same remote rural cabin annually. During this visit, in place of heading back home, they opt to prolong their holiday for a month longer – something that seems to disturb each resident in the nearby town. Each repeats a similar vague warning that not a soul has lingered at the lake beyond the holiday. Even so, they are resolved to stay, and at that point situations commence to grow more bizarre. The person who supplies the kerosene refuses to sell for them. Not a single person agrees to bring food to their home, and at the time the family endeavor to travel to the community, the automobile refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the batteries in the radio diminish, and when night comes, “the two old people crowded closely in their summer cottage and expected”. What could be they expecting? What could the townspeople understand? Every time I revisit the writer’s disturbing and thought-provoking tale, I’m reminded that the best horror comes from that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this brief tale two people go to a common beach community in which chimes sound continuously, a constant chiming that is irritating and inexplicable. The opening very scary scene happens after dark, as they choose to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the sea. The beach is there, there is the odor of decaying seafood and seawater, surf is audible, but the ocean appears spectral, or a different entity and even more alarming. It is truly insanely sinister and each occasion I visit to a beach after dark I remember this narrative that ruined the sea at night to my mind – positively.

The recent spouses – she’s very young, the husband is older – return to the hotel and discover why the bells ring, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and death-and-the-maiden intersects with grim ballet pandemonium. It is a disturbing contemplation regarding craving and decline, two people growing old jointly as spouses, the connection and aggression and affection in matrimony.

Not just the most terrifying, but likely one of the best concise narratives in existence, and a beloved choice. I experienced it in Spanish, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to appear in this country a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates

I read this narrative by a pool overseas a few years ago. Although it was sunny I sensed cold creep over me. Additionally, I sensed the thrill of excitement. I was composing a new project, and I faced an obstacle. I was uncertain if it was possible an effective approach to write various frightening aspects the story includes. Going through this book, I understood that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a dark flight through the mind of a criminal, the main character, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who slaughtered and mutilated multiple victims in a city between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, this person was obsessed with creating a zombie sex slave who would stay by his side and made many macabre trials to do so.

The actions the novel describes are appalling, but similarly terrifying is its own emotional authenticity. The character’s awful, broken reality is directly described in spare prose, identities hidden. The audience is plunged stuck in his mind, obliged to observe ideas and deeds that horrify. The alien nature of his thinking resembles a physical shock – or getting lost in an empty realm. Starting this story is not just reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I was a somnambulist and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the horror featured a nightmare during which I was trapped within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I found that I had torn off a part out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That building was falling apart; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall filled with water, maggots dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and at one time a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in my sister’s room.

After an acquaintance presented me with this author’s book, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the tale about the home high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar in my view, nostalgic as I was. It’s a story concerning a ghostly clamorous, emotional house and a young woman who eats calcium from the cliffs. I loved the novel so much and went back frequently to its pages, always finding {something