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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from a master of suspense

I encountered this story years ago and it has haunted me ever since. The named “summer people” are a couple from the city, who occupy the same off-grid lakeside house annually. This time, in place of heading back to urban life, they opt to prolong their stay for a month longer – an action that appears to unsettle each resident in the nearby town. All pass on an identical cryptic advice that no one has lingered in the area beyond the holiday. Regardless, the couple insist to not leave, and that is the moment situations commence to grow more bizarre. The individual who brings the kerosene won’t sell to them. Not a single person will deliver food to the cottage, and as the family try to travel to the community, the automobile fails to start. A storm gathers, the power of their radio die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people huddled together inside their cabin and expected”. What are this couple anticipating? What could the locals be aware of? Every time I revisit the writer’s disturbing and thought-provoking tale, I recall that the finest fright originates in the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a couple travel to a common coastal village in which chimes sound continuously, an incessant ringing that is irritating and inexplicable. The initial extremely terrifying moment takes place during the evening, as they opt to take a walk and they can’t find the sea. Sand is present, there is the odor of putrid marine life and salt, waves crash, but the ocean is a ghost, or another thing and even more alarming. It’s just profoundly ominous and every time I travel to the coast at night I remember this tale that destroyed the sea at night for me – in a good way.

The newlyweds – the wife is youthful, he’s not – return to their lodging and find out the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of confinement, macabre revelry and mortality and youth intersects with danse macabre pandemonium. It’s a chilling reflection on desire and decline, two bodies aging together as spouses, the attachment and brutality and affection within wedlock.

Not only the most frightening, but perhaps a top example of concise narratives in existence, and a beloved choice. I read it in Spanish, in the first edition of these tales to appear in this country a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from an esteemed writer

I delved into this book by a pool in the French countryside recently. Despite the sunshine I felt a chill within me. I also felt the thrill of fascination. I was writing my third novel, and I encountered a wall. I was uncertain if it was possible an effective approach to compose some of the fearful things the story includes. Going through this book, I understood that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a dark flight through the mind of a criminal, Quentin P, based on an infamous individual, the criminal who slaughtered and mutilated multiple victims in a city over a decade. Infamously, Dahmer was obsessed with creating a compliant victim that would remain by his side and attempted numerous horrific efforts to do so.

The deeds the novel describes are terrible, but equally frightening is its emotional authenticity. The character’s awful, fragmented world is directly described using minimal words, details omitted. You is immersed caught in his thoughts, compelled to observe ideas and deeds that shock. The alien nature of his psyche resembles a bodily jolt – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Entering this story is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel by a gifted writer

In my early years, I walked in my sleep and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. Once, the horror included a nightmare where I was confined within an enclosure and, as I roused, I found that I had removed the slat out of the window frame, trying to get out. That house was decaying; during heavy rain the entranceway flooded, fly larvae came down from the roof into the bedroom, and at one time a sizeable vermin climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.

After an acquaintance gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living at my family home, but the story regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to myself, longing at that time. It’s a story featuring a possessed noisy, emotional house and a young woman who consumes chalk from the shoreline. I cherished the story deeply and came back again and again to its pages, always finding {something