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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense

I discovered this story long ago and it has haunted me from that moment. The so-called “summer people” turn out to be a couple urban dwellers, who lease a particular isolated country cottage every summer. This time, in place of heading back to urban life, they decide to lengthen their holiday for a month longer – something that seems to disturb all the locals in the surrounding community. All pass on the same veiled caution that no one has ever stayed by the water after the end of summer. Nonetheless, the Allisons insist to stay, and that’s when events begin to become stranger. The individual who supplies the kerosene declines to provide for them. Not a single person will deliver supplies to the cottage, and as the Allisons try to go to the village, their vehicle fails to start. A tempest builds, the batteries in the radio die, and when night comes, “the two old people clung to each other inside their cabin and waited”. What are this couple waiting for? What could the locals know? Every time I revisit the writer’s unnerving and influential tale, I’m reminded that the finest fright stems from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a couple journey to a typical coastal village where church bells toll constantly, a constant chiming that is bothersome and inexplicable. The first extremely terrifying moment occurs after dark, at the time they opt to go for a stroll and they fail to see the sea. Sand is present, the scent exists of putrid marine life and salt, waves crash, but the ocean seems phantom, or another thing and more dreadful. It is simply profoundly ominous and every time I visit to the coast in the evening I recall this narrative which spoiled the beach in the evening in my view – favorably.

The young couple – the woman is adolescent, he’s not – head back to the inn and find out the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of confinement, necro-orgy and demise and innocence encounters grim ballet pandemonium. It’s an unnerving meditation regarding craving and decline, two people growing old jointly as a couple, the bond and violence and affection of marriage.

Not just the scariest, but probably one of the best concise narratives out there, and a beloved choice. I read it en español, in the first edition of Aickman stories to appear locally a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from an esteemed writer

I perused Zombie near the water in the French countryside recently. Although it was sunny I sensed cold creep through me. I also felt the electricity of excitement. I was writing my third novel, and I faced a wall. I was uncertain if there was an effective approach to compose various frightening aspects the story includes. Going through this book, I realized that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the novel is a grim journey through the mind of a murderer, the main character, modeled after an infamous individual, the serial killer who killed and mutilated 17 young men and boys in the Midwest during a specific period. Infamously, this person was obsessed with making a zombie sex slave who would never leave him and made many macabre trials to do so.

The deeds the book depicts are horrific, but just as scary is the emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s awful, shattered existence is simply narrated using minimal words, names redacted. The audience is plunged stuck in his mind, forced to witness ideas and deeds that shock. The foreignness of his thinking is like a tangible impact – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Entering this book is less like reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from a gifted writer

When I was a child, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the terror featured a vision during which I was stuck within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had removed a part off the window, attempting to escape. That house was crumbling; when storms came the ground floor corridor filled with water, insect eggs fell from the ceiling onto the bed, and once a large rat scaled the curtains in that space.

Once a companion gave me this author’s book, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the narrative about the home located on the coastline felt familiar to me, homesick at that time. This is a novel about a haunted noisy, sentimental building and a young woman who eats limestone from the cliffs. I cherished the novel deeply and returned again and again to the story, always finding {something