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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by a master of suspense

I encountered this narrative years ago and it has haunted me from that moment. The so-called vacationers are the Allisons from the city, who occupy the same isolated rural cabin every summer. On this occasion, instead of returning home, they choose to extend their vacation an extra month – something that seems to disturb everyone in the nearby town. All pass on the same veiled caution that no one has remained in the area past the holiday. Nonetheless, the Allisons insist to stay, and that’s when events begin to grow more bizarre. The person who brings fuel declines to provide for them. Not a single person will deliver food to the cabin, and as the Allisons endeavor to travel to the community, their vehicle fails to start. Bad weather approaches, the energy within the device die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple clung to each other in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What are this couple anticipating? What might the residents understand? Each occasion I peruse this author’s chilling and thought-provoking tale, I’m reminded that the best horror stems from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes from a noted author

In this short story a couple go to a common coastal village where church bells toll continuously, an incessant ringing that is irritating and inexplicable. The opening extremely terrifying moment happens after dark, when they opt to walk around and they can’t find the sea. There’s sand, there is the odor of rotting fish and salt, there are waves, but the water is a ghost, or another thing and even more alarming. It is simply deeply malevolent and each occasion I travel to a beach after dark I remember this narrative that ruined the sea at night to my mind – in a good way.

The young couple – she’s very young, the man is mature – go back to the inn and find out the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and demise and innocence intersects with danse macabre chaos. It is a disturbing contemplation about longing and decay, two people maturing in tandem as spouses, the bond and aggression and tenderness within wedlock.

Not just the scariest, but likely a top example of short stories in existence, and an individual preference. I experienced it in Spanish, in the initial publication of these tales to be published in this country in 2011.

Catriona Ward

Zombie from an esteemed writer

I perused this narrative beside the swimming area in France recently. Despite the sunshine I sensed a chill over me. I also experienced the thrill of excitement. I was composing my third novel, and I encountered an obstacle. I didn’t know if there was an effective approach to write some of the fearful things the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I understood that it was possible.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a grim journey through the mind of a young serial killer, the main character, inspired by an infamous individual, the criminal who slaughtered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee during a specific period. Notoriously, the killer was obsessed with creating a zombie sex slave that would remain with him and carried out several macabre trials to accomplish it.

The acts the novel describes are terrible, but just as scary is the emotional authenticity. Quentin P’s dreadful, shattered existence is directly described using minimal words, names redacted. You is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, obliged to observe thoughts and actions that shock. The foreignness of his mind resembles a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Starting Zombie feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. Once, the horror featured a nightmare during which I was stuck within an enclosure and, as I roused, I realized that I had ripped a piece off the window, seeking to leave. That building was crumbling; when it rained heavily the entranceway flooded, insect eggs dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and once a large rat climbed the drapes in that space.

When a friend presented me with the story, I was no longer living with my parents, but the story regarding the building perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable to myself, homesick as I felt. It’s a book featuring a possessed loud, emotional house and a young woman who ingests limestone off the rocks. I adored the novel deeply and came back again and again to it, consistently uncovering {something