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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I discovered this story some time back and it has lingered with me from that moment. The so-called vacationers turn out to be a couple from the city, who rent a particular isolated rural cabin annually. This time, instead of heading back home, they decide to prolong their stay for a month longer – a decision that to unsettle everyone in the adjacent village. All pass on the same veiled caution that not a soul has remained by the water beyond Labor Day. Even so, they insist to remain, and at that point things start to become stranger. The person who delivers the kerosene declines to provide to them. Not a single person will deliver supplies to the cabin, and as the Allisons try to go to the village, their vehicle won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the power within the device fade, and when night comes, “the elderly couple crowded closely within their rental and expected”. What could be this couple expecting? What might the townspeople understand? Whenever I read Jackson’s unnerving and thought-provoking narrative, I remember that the finest fright originates in what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a couple go to a common beach community where bells ring constantly, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and unexplainable. The initial very scary scene happens after dark, when they decide to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the water. Sand is present, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and seawater, surf is audible, but the ocean is a ghost, or a different entity and even more alarming. It’s just profoundly ominous and each occasion I go to the coast in the evening I remember this tale which spoiled the sea at night in my view – positively.

The newlyweds – the woman is adolescent, he’s not – head back to their lodging and learn the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth encounters grim ballet bedlam. It is a disturbing contemplation on desire and decline, a pair of individuals aging together as spouses, the connection and violence and affection of marriage.

Not only the scariest, but likely among the finest brief tales out there, and a beloved choice. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of these tales to appear in this country several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I read Zombie by a pool in France in 2020. Although it was sunny I experienced an icy feeling over me. I also felt the thrill of excitement. I was composing a new project, and I encountered a wall. I didn’t know if it was possible an effective approach to write some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I saw that there was a way.

Released decades ago, the story is a dark flight through the mind of a criminal, the main character, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who slaughtered and dismembered numerous individuals in a city between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, Dahmer was consumed with producing a submissive individual who would never leave him and attempted numerous macabre trials to achieve this.

The actions the book depicts are terrible, but just as scary is its own emotional authenticity. Quentin P’s awful, fragmented world is plainly told using minimal words, details omitted. You is plunged caught in his thoughts, forced to witness thoughts and actions that horrify. The foreignness of his psyche is like a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Entering this story is not just reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching from a gifted writer

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and eventually began having night terrors. At one point, the fear featured a dream where I was stuck within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I realized that I had ripped a piece from the window, trying to get out. That home was falling apart; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall filled with water, maggots dropped from above into the bedroom, and at one time a large rat ascended the window coverings in that space.

When a friend gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living with my parents, but the narrative of the house perched on the cliffs felt familiar to me, longing as I felt. It is a story featuring a possessed noisy, atmospheric home and a young woman who ingests chalk from the shoreline. I adored the story immensely and returned frequently to its pages, always finding {something