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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by a master of suspense

I encountered this tale long ago and it has stayed with me from that moment. The so-called vacationers happen to be a couple from the city, who lease a particular isolated country cottage each year. During this visit, in place of going back to urban life, they opt to prolong their holiday an extra month – an action that appears to disturb all the locals in the nearby town. Everyone conveys the same veiled caution that no one has remained by the water past the end of summer. Regardless, the couple are determined to not leave, and that’s when events begin to become stranger. The individual who delivers oil declines to provide for them. Not a single person will deliver food to the cabin, and as they try to travel to the community, the car fails to start. Bad weather approaches, the energy in the radio fade, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple crowded closely in their summer cottage and expected”. What might be this couple anticipating? What do the locals be aware of? Every time I revisit the writer’s chilling and inspiring narrative, I remember that the best horror originates in what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman

In this short story two people travel to a typical beach community where bells ring continuously, a constant chiming that is irritating and puzzling. The opening truly frightening moment occurs at night, as they opt to walk around and they can’t find the water. The beach is there, there is the odor of putrid marine life and seawater, there are waves, but the ocean is a ghost, or another thing and worse. It is simply insanely sinister and each occasion I visit to the shore at night I think about this story which spoiled the sea at night in my view – in a good way.

The recent spouses – the wife is youthful, he’s not – return to their lodging and discover the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of confinement, necro-orgy and demise and innocence meets dance of death pandemonium. It’s an unnerving reflection about longing and deterioration, two bodies maturing in tandem as a couple, the attachment and brutality and affection in matrimony.

Not just the most frightening, but perhaps among the finest brief tales out there, and a beloved choice. I experienced it in Spanish, in the first edition of these tales to appear in Argentina a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from an esteemed writer

I delved into this book near the water in France a few years ago. Despite the sunshine I felt cold creep through me. I also felt the excitement of fascination. I was composing my third novel, and I encountered a block. I was uncertain if it was possible an effective approach to write various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Experiencing this novel, I realized that it was possible.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a dark flight through the mind of a murderer, the protagonist, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who murdered and cut apart 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee over a decade. As is well-known, Dahmer was fixated with creating a zombie sex slave who would stay by his side and made many grisly attempts to do so.

The actions the book depicts are horrific, but similarly terrifying is its psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s dreadful, fragmented world is simply narrated using minimal words, names redacted. You is immersed trapped in his consciousness, forced to observe mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The foreignness of his mind is like a tangible impact – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Going into this book is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I walked in my sleep and subsequently commenced suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the horror involved a nightmare where I was trapped in a box and, as I roused, I realized that I had torn off a part off the window, seeking to leave. That house was crumbling; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall filled with water, insect eggs dropped from above onto the bed, and on one occasion a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

After an acquaintance presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out in my childhood residence, but the story of the house located on the coastline seemed recognizable in my view, homesick at that time. This is a story featuring a possessed clamorous, atmospheric home and a female character who eats calcium off the rocks. I loved the story immensely and went back again and again to its pages, consistently uncovering {something