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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by a master of suspense

I encountered this tale years ago and it has stayed with me since then. The so-called “summer people” turn out to be a couple urban dwellers, who lease a particular off-grid country cottage annually. This time, in place of returning to the city, they choose to extend their vacation an extra month – something that seems to alarm each resident in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that not a soul has ever stayed at the lake beyond the end of summer. Nonetheless, they are determined to not leave, and that’s when situations commence to get increasingly weird. The individual who supplies oil declines to provide for them. Nobody agrees to bring groceries to the cottage, and when the Allisons attempt to drive into town, the car won’t start. A tempest builds, the batteries of their radio die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple huddled together inside their cabin and waited”. What could be this couple anticipating? What could the locals understand? Each occasion I peruse this author’s unnerving and influential narrative, I recall that the top terror stems from the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a pair go to a common coastal village in which chimes sound constantly, an incessant ringing that is annoying and inexplicable. The initial very scary scene occurs after dark, when they opt to go for a stroll and they can’t find the water. There’s sand, there is the odor of putrid marine life and salt, waves crash, but the water seems phantom, or a different entity and worse. It’s just deeply malevolent and each occasion I go to a beach after dark I think about this tale which spoiled the ocean after dark to my mind – positively.

The newlyweds – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – return to the inn and learn the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of confinement, gruesome festivities and demise and innocence intersects with grim ballet chaos. It’s a chilling contemplation on desire and deterioration, two bodies aging together as spouses, the bond and brutality and tenderness in matrimony.

Not just the most frightening, but likely one of the best concise narratives available, and a beloved choice. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of these tales to be published in Argentina in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates

I perused Zombie by a pool in France a few years ago. Despite the sunshine I experienced an icy feeling through me. Additionally, I sensed the excitement of excitement. I was working on my latest book, and I faced a block. I wasn’t sure if it was possible any good way to write some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Experiencing this novel, I saw that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a grim journey into the thoughts of a criminal, the protagonist, based on a notorious figure, the murderer who murdered and cut apart 17 young men and boys in the Midwest during a specific period. Infamously, Dahmer was consumed with making a zombie sex slave who would stay him and attempted numerous macabre trials to do so.

The actions the book depicts are terrible, but equally frightening is the mental realism. The protagonist’s awful, shattered existence is plainly told using minimal words, names redacted. The audience is plunged caught in his thoughts, compelled to see thoughts and actions that appal. The foreignness of his psyche feels like a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Starting this book feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from a gifted writer

When I was a child, I sleepwalked and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the fear involved a vision where I was confined inside a container and, upon awakening, I discovered that I had removed a part from the window, trying to get out. That house was falling apart; during heavy rain the ground floor corridor filled with water, fly larvae dropped from above into the bedroom, and at one time a large rat scaled the curtains in that space.

Once a companion handed me this author’s book, I had moved out in my childhood residence, but the story of the house perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable in my view, nostalgic at that time. This is a novel concerning a ghostly loud, sentimental building and a young woman who consumes chalk from the cliffs. I loved the book immensely and went back frequently to the story, each time discovering {something