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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by a master of suspense

I read this story long ago and it has lingered with me since then. The titular “summer people” are a couple from the city, who lease an identical off-grid rural cabin annually. During this visit, rather than returning to the city, they choose to extend their stay an extra month – a decision that to alarm everyone in the nearby town. All pass on an identical cryptic advice that not a soul has lingered at the lake beyond the end of summer. Nonetheless, the Allisons are determined to remain, and that is the moment events begin to get increasingly weird. The man who brings oil won’t sell to the couple. Nobody will deliver food to the cabin, and as they try to go to the village, the automobile refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the energy in the radio fade, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple crowded closely within their rental and waited”. What might be this couple expecting? What might the residents be aware of? Each occasion I read the writer’s disturbing and influential tale, I remember that the best horror stems from the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes from a noted author

In this brief tale two people travel to an ordinary coastal village in which chimes sound the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and inexplicable. The initial very scary episode happens at night, at the time they opt to walk around and they can’t find the water. Sand is present, the scent exists of decaying seafood and seawater, surf is audible, but the ocean is a ghost, or something else and worse. It is truly insanely sinister and each occasion I visit to the shore at night I recall this tale which spoiled the ocean after dark for me – in a good way.

The newlyweds – the woman is adolescent, he’s not – go back to their lodging and discover the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, necro-orgy and demise and innocence encounters dance of death bedlam. It’s a chilling reflection about longing and decay, two people aging together as a couple, the attachment and aggression and tenderness of marriage.

Not merely the most terrifying, but probably among the finest brief tales available, and an individual preference. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of this author’s works to appear in this country a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I delved into Zombie by a pool overseas in 2020. Even with the bright weather I experienced an icy feeling through me. I also experienced the thrill of anticipation. I was composing my third novel, and I encountered a wall. I was uncertain whether there existed a proper method to write certain terrifying elements the story includes. Going through this book, I saw that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the book is a bleak exploration into the thoughts of a young serial killer, the main character, inspired by a notorious figure, the murderer who slaughtered and dismembered numerous individuals in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, the killer was consumed with producing a zombie sex slave that would remain with him and carried out several grisly attempts to do so.

The acts the novel describes are terrible, but equally frightening is its own psychological persuasiveness. The character’s terrible, shattered existence is plainly told using minimal words, names redacted. The audience is immersed caught in his thoughts, forced to witness ideas and deeds that shock. The strangeness of his mind resembles a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Going into this book feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I sleepwalked and later started suffering from bad dreams. Once, the horror involved a vision during which I was trapped within an enclosure and, upon awakening, I realized that I had removed a piece out of the window frame, attempting to escape. That building was decaying; when storms came the entranceway flooded, insect eggs dropped from above into the bedroom, and on one occasion a large rat scaled the curtains in my sister’s room.

When a friend presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living with my parents, but the tale of the house perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable in my view, longing as I was. This is a book featuring a possessed clamorous, atmospheric home and a girl who consumes limestone off the rocks. I loved the novel deeply and went back frequently to the story, each time discovering {something