🔗 Share this article

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I encountered this tale years ago and it has stayed with me from that moment. The so-called vacationers turn out to be a couple from the city, who lease the same remote lakeside house annually. This time, rather than returning to urban life, they choose to lengthen their stay a few more weeks – something that seems to alarm all the locals in the surrounding community. Each repeats the same veiled caution that nobody has lingered by the water after the holiday. Regardless, the couple insist to stay, and that is the moment events begin to grow more bizarre. The person who brings the kerosene won’t sell to the couple. Nobody is willing to supply groceries to the cabin, and when the family attempt to go to the village, the car won’t start. A storm gathers, the power within the device fade, and with the arrival of dusk, “the aged individuals huddled together in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What could be the Allisons expecting? What might the residents know? Every time I peruse the writer’s chilling and thought-provoking tale, I recall that the best horror stems from that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes by a noted author

In this concise narrative a pair go to an ordinary coastal village in which chimes sound the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and unexplainable. The initial truly frightening moment occurs at night, at the time they choose to go for a stroll and they can’t find the water. The beach is there, the scent exists of decaying seafood and brine, waves crash, but the ocean seems phantom, or a different entity and worse. It is truly insanely sinister and each occasion I go to the coast in the evening I remember this tale that ruined the sea at night to my mind – favorably.

The young couple – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – return to the hotel and discover the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of confinement, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth intersects with grim ballet pandemonium. It is a disturbing meditation about longing and decline, two people maturing in tandem as a couple, the attachment and brutality and affection of marriage.

Not merely the most terrifying, but likely among the finest concise narratives out there, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in Spanish, in the first edition of these tales to be released in Argentina several years back.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this narrative near the water overseas in 2020. Even with the bright weather I felt an icy feeling within me. I also felt the excitement of anticipation. I was working on my latest book, and I had hit a block. I was uncertain if there was any good way to write certain terrifying elements the story includes. Going through this book, I realized that it was possible.

Published in 1995, the novel is a dark flight within the psyche of a young serial killer, the main character, inspired by a notorious figure, the serial killer who slaughtered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in the Midwest over a decade. Notoriously, Dahmer was fixated with creating a zombie sex slave that would remain by his side and made many horrific efforts to achieve this.

The deeds the story tells are appalling, but just as scary is its own psychological persuasiveness. The protagonist’s awful, fragmented world is directly described using minimal words, names redacted. You is immersed stuck in his mind, obliged to witness ideas and deeds that appal. The foreignness of his psyche feels like a bodily jolt – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Starting Zombie is less like reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and subsequently commenced experiencing nightmares. At one point, the fear featured a dream during which I was confined within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I found that I had removed a piece out of the window frame, attempting to escape. That building was falling apart; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall became inundated, fly larvae dropped from above into the bedroom, and once a big rodent climbed the drapes in the bedroom.

Once a companion handed me the story, I had moved out in my childhood residence, 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, atmospheric home and a young woman who eats chalk off the rocks. I cherished the novel so much and came back again and again to it, always finding {something