🔗 Share this article

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense

I encountered this narrative long ago and it has lingered with me ever since. The so-called seasonal visitors are the Allisons from the city, who lease the same off-grid lakeside house every summer. This time, in place of going back home, they decide to prolong their vacation an extra month – something that seems to disturb each resident in the nearby town. Each repeats the same veiled caution that not a soul has ever stayed in the area after Labor Day. Regardless, they insist to remain, and that’s when situations commence to grow more bizarre. The person who supplies fuel refuses to sell to them. Not a single person is willing to supply food to the cottage, and as the Allisons attempt to travel to the community, the car won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the batteries within the device diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple crowded closely in their summer cottage and waited”. What could be this couple expecting? What do the townspeople know? Every time I revisit the writer’s unnerving and thought-provoking narrative, I’m reminded that the top terror comes from what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this short story two people go to a common coastal village where bells ring continuously, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and unexplainable. The first very scary moment takes place after dark, when they choose to take a walk and they are unable to locate the sea. There’s sand, there is the odor of decaying seafood and brine, waves crash, but the ocean seems phantom, or a different entity and even more alarming. It is truly profoundly ominous and each occasion I visit to the shore in the evening I recall this tale that ruined the beach in the evening to my mind – favorably.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, he’s not – return to the inn and discover the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of confinement, macabre revelry and demise and innocence intersects with dance of death chaos. It’s an unnerving reflection on desire and deterioration, two bodies maturing in tandem as a couple, the connection and aggression and gentleness within wedlock.

Not only the scariest, but likely one of the best concise narratives out there, and an individual preference. I encountered it in Spanish, in the first edition of Aickman stories to appear in Argentina several years back.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I delved into this book near the water in the French countryside a few years ago. Despite the sunshine I sensed a chill within me. Additionally, I sensed the thrill of anticipation. I was writing my latest book, and I encountered a block. I didn’t know if it was possible a proper method to craft some of the fearful things the story includes. Reading Zombie, I saw that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the book is a dark flight into the thoughts of a murderer, the protagonist, inspired by an infamous individual, the criminal who killed and cut apart multiple victims in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, Dahmer was consumed with creating a compliant victim who would stay him and attempted numerous grisly attempts to accomplish it.

The deeds the story tells are terrible, but similarly terrifying is the psychological persuasiveness. The character’s awful, fragmented world is simply narrated in spare prose, names redacted. The audience is plunged caught in his thoughts, obliged to see mental processes and behaviors that shock. The alien nature of his thinking feels like a tangible impact – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Going into this story feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from a gifted writer

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the horror featured a vision in which I was stuck in a box and, as I roused, I discovered that I had removed a piece from the window, seeking to leave. That home was falling apart; during heavy rain the ground floor corridor filled with water, fly larvae fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and once a big rodent ascended the window coverings in that space.

Once a companion gave me the story, I had moved out at my family home, but the narrative of the house perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable in my view, longing as I felt. This is a novel about a haunted noisy, emotional house and a female character who ingests chalk from the cliffs. I cherished the story so much and returned again and again to it, each time discovering {something