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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I discovered this story long ago and it has haunted me from that moment. The named “summer people” happen to be a family urban dwellers, who lease an identical isolated country cottage every summer. During this visit, instead of heading back to the city, they decide to extend their stay for a month longer – something that seems to alarm everyone in the nearby town. Each repeats the same veiled caution that no one has lingered at the lake past the holiday. Even so, the couple insist to remain, and at that point events begin to become stranger. The individual who delivers the kerosene refuses to sell for them. No one agrees to bring food to the cottage, and when the family endeavor to go to the village, their vehicle fails to start. A tempest builds, the batteries in the radio diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people clung to each other in their summer cottage and waited”. What are this couple anticipating? What might the locals know? Each occasion I revisit the writer’s chilling and influential narrative, I remember that the best horror comes from what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this short story a pair journey to an ordinary beach community where bells ring constantly, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and unexplainable. The initial truly frightening episode occurs during the evening, at the time they opt to walk around and they can’t find the water. There’s sand, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and salt, there are waves, but the water appears spectral, or a different entity and even more alarming. It is simply insanely sinister and every time I travel to the shore in the evening I think about this tale which spoiled the sea at night to my mind – positively.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, the husband is older – return to the inn and find out why the bells ring, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, necro-orgy and mortality and youth encounters dance of death chaos. It’s an unnerving meditation on desire and decay, a pair of individuals growing old jointly as spouses, the attachment and aggression and gentleness of marriage.

Not just the scariest, but likely one of the best short stories available, and a personal favourite. I read it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of this author’s works to appear in Argentina several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer

I perused this book near the water in the French countryside recently. Although it was sunny I experienced a chill through me. Additionally, I sensed the excitement of excitement. I was writing a new project, and I encountered a wall. I was uncertain if it was possible an effective approach to write various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Going through this book, I understood that it was possible.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a grim journey through the mind of a young serial killer, the main character, based on an infamous individual, the serial killer who slaughtered and mutilated 17 young men and boys in a city during a specific period. Notoriously, the killer was obsessed with making a submissive individual who would never leave with him and made many grisly attempts to do so.

The acts the story tells are horrific, but just as scary is the psychological persuasiveness. The character’s awful, broken reality is directly described in spare prose, details omitted. The reader is plunged stuck in his mind, obliged to observe mental processes and behaviors that shock. The foreignness of his mind is like a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated on a desolate planet. Going into Zombie is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and eventually began having night terrors. At one point, the terror involved a dream in which I was stuck inside a container and, as I roused, I discovered that I had removed the slat from the window, attempting to escape. That house was falling apart; when storms came the entranceway filled with water, maggots fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and at one time a large rat scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

When a friend gave me this author’s book, I was no longer living with my parents, but the story regarding the building perched on the cliffs appeared known to myself, longing at that time. It’s a story concerning a ghostly noisy, sentimental building and a female character who ingests limestone from the shoreline. I cherished the story so much and went back frequently to the story, always finding {something