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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I encountered this story some time back and it has stayed with me since then. The titular vacationers happen to be the Allisons from New York, who lease the same remote country cottage each year. On this occasion, in place of returning to urban life, they decide to extend their holiday a few more weeks – an action that appears to disturb all the locals in the surrounding community. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that not a soul has remained at the lake beyond Labor Day. Nonetheless, they are resolved to stay, and that’s when situations commence to become stranger. The person who delivers the kerosene refuses to sell for them. Not a single person will deliver supplies to their home, and as they attempt to go to the village, their vehicle won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the batteries in the radio diminish, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple clung to each other inside their cabin and waited”. What are this couple anticipating? What do the locals understand? Each occasion I revisit this author’s disturbing and influential tale, I’m reminded that the finest fright originates in the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes from a noted author

In this concise narrative a couple journey to a common seaside town in which chimes sound the whole time, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and puzzling. The initial very scary episode happens at night, when they choose to walk around and they can’t find the sea. There’s sand, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and seawater, surf is audible, but the sea seems phantom, or another thing and even more alarming. It is truly profoundly ominous and whenever I visit to the shore at night I think about this story that ruined the ocean after dark in my view – in a good way.

The young couple – the woman is adolescent, he’s not – go back to their lodging and find out why the bells ring, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and mortality and youth encounters danse macabre bedlam. It’s an unnerving reflection on desire and decay, two bodies aging together as partners, the attachment and violence and tenderness of marriage.

Not only the scariest, but perhaps among the finest short stories available, and an individual preference. I read it in Spanish, in the first edition of Aickman stories to appear in this country in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I read Zombie near the water in the French countryside recently. Although it was sunny I sensed a chill within me. Additionally, I sensed the electricity of fascination. I was working on my latest book, and I faced a wall. I was uncertain if there was any good way to compose certain terrifying elements the book contains. Reading Zombie, I understood that there was a way.

Released decades ago, the book is a bleak exploration within the psyche of a young serial killer, the protagonist, based on a notorious figure, the murderer who murdered and mutilated multiple victims in the Midwest over a decade. Notoriously, this person was obsessed with producing a compliant victim who would never leave by his side and carried out several grisly attempts to do so.

The actions the story tells are terrible, but equally frightening is the mental realism. The character’s terrible, broken reality is directly described with concise language, details omitted. You is plunged trapped in his consciousness, obliged to see ideas and deeds that horrify. The alien nature of his mind feels like a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Going into Zombie is less like reading than a full body experience. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I sleepwalked and later started experiencing nightmares. At one point, the terror included a dream where I was stuck in a box and, upon awakening, I realized that I had removed the slat off the window, seeking to leave. That house was falling apart; when storms came the entranceway filled with water, insect eggs fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and once a large rat climbed the drapes in the bedroom.

After an acquaintance handed me this author’s book, I had moved out in my childhood residence, but the story about the home located on the coastline felt familiar in my view, nostalgic as I was. This is a book featuring a possessed clamorous, atmospheric home and a female character who ingests limestone from the cliffs. I adored the story so much and came back again and again to its pages, each time discovering {something