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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense

I discovered this tale some time back and it has lingered with me since then. The named seasonal visitors are a family from the city, who rent the same isolated rural cabin every summer. During this visit, in place of returning to the city, they choose to prolong their vacation for a month longer – a decision that to disturb all the locals in the nearby town. Each repeats an identical cryptic advice that no one has remained by the water past the holiday. Regardless, they are resolved to not leave, and that’s when events begin to become stranger. The man who delivers fuel refuses to sell for them. Not a single person agrees to bring food to the cabin, and when the family attempt to drive into town, their vehicle refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the power within the device fade, and with the arrival of dusk, “the aged individuals crowded closely in their summer cottage and expected”. What are this couple waiting for? What could the townspeople be aware of? Whenever I peruse this author’s chilling and thought-provoking story, I remember that the best horror originates in the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by a noted author

In this short story a pair travel to a common beach community in which chimes sound continuously, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and puzzling. The opening extremely terrifying episode happens during the evening, as they opt to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the water. There’s sand, there’s the smell of rotting fish and seawater, waves crash, but the ocean is a ghost, or something else and even more alarming. It’s just deeply malevolent and every time I go to the coast at night I recall this narrative that ruined the ocean after dark to my mind – positively.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, he’s not – go back to the inn and learn why the bells ring, during a prolonged scene of confinement, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth encounters grim ballet bedlam. It’s an unnerving meditation regarding craving and decay, two people growing old jointly as partners, the connection and aggression and affection within wedlock.

Not just the most frightening, but probably among the finest brief tales available, and an individual preference. I encountered it in Spanish, in the debut release of Aickman stories to be published in this country a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I delved into this narrative beside the swimming area in France in 2020. Even with the bright weather I sensed an icy feeling over me. I also experienced the thrill of excitement. I was writing a new project, and I encountered a wall. I was uncertain if there was any good way to craft certain terrifying elements the book contains. Going through this book, I understood that there was a way.

Released decades ago, the story is a dark flight into the thoughts of a young serial killer, the main character, based on an infamous individual, the murderer who slaughtered and cut apart multiple victims in the Midwest during a specific period. Infamously, Dahmer was fixated with producing a zombie sex slave who would never leave him and carried out several grisly attempts to achieve this.

The actions the book depicts are terrible, but similarly terrifying is its emotional authenticity. Quentin P’s awful, shattered existence is simply narrated using minimal words, names redacted. You is plunged trapped in his consciousness, forced to witness ideas and deeds that appal. The alien nature of his mind feels like a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Starting Zombie feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel by a gifted writer

During my youth, I sleepwalked and later started suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the horror involved a nightmare during which I was trapped within an enclosure and, upon awakening, I realized that I had torn off a part from the window, attempting to escape. That house was crumbling; when it rained heavily the ground floor corridor became inundated, maggots came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and once a sizeable vermin climbed the drapes in that space.

When a friend handed me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere in my childhood residence, but the narrative about the home high on the Dover cliffs appeared known to myself, homesick at that time. This is a novel about a haunted noisy, atmospheric home and a young woman who eats calcium off the rocks. I adored the novel so much and came back frequently to it, each time discovering {something