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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by a master of suspense

I discovered this story some time back and it has lingered with me since then. The so-called seasonal visitors happen to be a couple from the city, who rent the same remote rural cabin every summer. On this occasion, in place of heading back to urban life, they choose to prolong their holiday for a month longer – an action that appears to alarm everyone in the nearby town. Each repeats the same veiled caution that no one has lingered by the water past the end of summer. Regardless, the couple are determined to remain, and that is the moment events begin to get increasingly weird. The individual who delivers oil won’t sell for them. No one will deliver groceries to the cabin, and as the Allisons endeavor to go to the village, their vehicle won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the power in the radio diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people clung to each other within their rental and waited”. What are the Allisons waiting for? What might the locals understand? Whenever I read the writer’s chilling and thought-provoking narrative, I remember that the best horror comes from what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from a noted author

In this brief tale two people travel to a common seaside town where bells ring the whole time, a constant chiming that is bothersome and unexplainable. The opening very scary moment takes place at night, when they choose to walk around and they are unable to locate the water. There’s sand, there’s the smell of rotting fish and salt, waves crash, but the ocean appears spectral, or a different entity and more dreadful. It is simply insanely sinister and every time I travel to the coast after dark I recall this story that ruined the sea at night to my mind – in a good way.

The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, the husband is older – go back to their lodging and learn the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and death-and-the-maiden meets danse macabre pandemonium. It is a disturbing meditation on desire and decay, two people aging together as a couple, the bond and violence and tenderness in matrimony.

Not merely the scariest, but probably among the finest short stories in existence, and a personal favourite. I read it en español, in the initial publication of these tales to be released locally in 2011.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates

I perused Zombie by a pool overseas in 2020. Although it was sunny I sensed a chill through me. I also experienced the thrill of excitement. I was working on my latest book, and I encountered a wall. I didn’t know if it was possible any good way to craft certain terrifying elements the book contains. Reading Zombie, I saw that there was a way.

Published in 1995, the novel is a bleak exploration into the thoughts of a murderer, the main character, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who killed and cut apart 17 young men and boys in a city over a decade. Infamously, Dahmer was consumed with producing a zombie sex slave who would never leave by his side and carried out several horrific efforts to accomplish it.

The actions the story tells are appalling, but equally frightening is the mental realism. The character’s terrible, fragmented world is directly described with concise language, identities hidden. You is plunged caught in his thoughts, obliged to see thoughts and actions that shock. The foreignness of his mind is like a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Entering Zombie feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching from a gifted writer

During my youth, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced experiencing nightmares. Once, the terror involved a dream where I was confined in a box and, upon awakening, I found that I had torn off a part off the window, seeking to leave. That building was decaying; during heavy rain the entranceway filled with water, fly larvae came down from the roof onto the bed, and at one time a big rodent ascended the window coverings in my sister’s room.

Once a companion handed me the story, I had moved out in my childhood residence, but the tale regarding the building located on the coastline appeared known in my view, longing as I was. It is a novel featuring a possessed loud, sentimental building and a female character who ingests limestone from the cliffs. I adored the novel immensely and returned frequently to its pages, always finding {something