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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I read this narrative some time back and it has haunted me ever since. The named seasonal visitors turn out to be a family from the city, who lease the same remote rural cabin each year. On this occasion, instead of returning home, they choose to lengthen their vacation for a month longer – a decision that to alarm each resident in the nearby town. Each repeats the same veiled caution that not a soul has remained in the area past the end of summer. Even so, the Allisons are resolved to not leave, and at that point situations commence to get increasingly weird. The individual who delivers the kerosene declines to provide to them. Not a single person will deliver food to the cottage, and as they attempt to drive into town, their vehicle won’t start. A storm gathers, the batteries of their radio fade, and when night comes, “the elderly couple huddled together inside their cabin and waited”. What might be the Allisons anticipating? What could the townspeople know? Every time I read this author’s unnerving and influential story, I’m reminded that the finest fright originates in what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman

In this short story a couple journey to a typical beach community where bells ring continuously, an incessant ringing that is annoying and unexplainable. The first very scary scene happens after dark, when they opt to walk around and they fail to see the sea. Sand is present, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and salt, there are waves, but the sea is a ghost, or another thing and more dreadful. It’s just insanely sinister and each occasion I travel to a beach at night I recall this narrative that ruined the beach in the evening for me – in a good way.

The recent spouses – she’s very young, the man is mature – head back to the inn and find out the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and mortality and youth intersects with danse macabre pandemonium. It’s an unnerving contemplation about longing and decline, a pair of individuals maturing in tandem as partners, the connection and violence and gentleness in matrimony.

Not just the most frightening, but likely one of the best brief tales available, and a beloved choice. I read it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of these tales to be published in this country in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates

I read Zombie near the water in the French countryside in 2020. Although it was sunny I felt a chill over me. Additionally, I sensed the thrill of anticipation. I was working on my third novel, and I encountered an obstacle. I wasn’t sure whether there existed a proper method to compose certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Experiencing this novel, I understood that there was a way.

Released decades ago, the novel is a bleak exploration through the mind of a young serial killer, the protagonist, based on a notorious figure, the criminal who killed and dismembered numerous individuals in a city over a decade. Notoriously, Dahmer was fixated with producing a submissive individual that would remain him and attempted numerous horrific efforts to achieve this.

The deeds the story tells are terrible, but similarly terrifying is its own psychological persuasiveness. The protagonist’s dreadful, fragmented world is plainly told using minimal words, details omitted. The reader is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, forced to observe mental processes and behaviors that appal. The alien nature of his thinking resembles a tangible impact – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Starting this story is less like reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from a gifted writer

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and subsequently commenced suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the fear featured a vision during which I was confined inside a container and, when I woke up, I found that I had ripped a piece out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That house was crumbling; during heavy rain the downstairs hall flooded, maggots dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and at one time a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

After an acquaintance handed me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out with my parents, but the tale of the house high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to myself, longing as I was. This is a novel concerning a ghostly noisy, sentimental building and a female character who ingests chalk from the cliffs. I adored the book so much and went back repeatedly to its pages, always finding {something