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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by a master of suspense

I encountered this tale years ago and it has lingered with me since then. The so-called “summer people” are a family from New York, who lease a particular off-grid country cottage every summer. During this visit, rather than going back to urban life, they decide to prolong their holiday an extra month – a decision that to unsettle everyone in the nearby town. All pass on an identical cryptic advice that not a soul has lingered by the water after the holiday. Regardless, the couple are determined to remain, and at that point events begin to grow more bizarre. The man who delivers oil refuses to sell for them. Not a single person is willing to supply food to their home, and as the family try to go to the village, the car fails to start. A storm gathers, the power in the radio die, and when night comes, “the aged individuals huddled together within their rental and waited”. What are this couple anticipating? What could the townspeople understand? Whenever I revisit the writer’s disturbing and inspiring story, I recall that the finest fright comes from that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from a noted author

In this short story two people go to a typical coastal village where bells ring continuously, a constant chiming that is irritating and unexplainable. The initial very scary scene takes place after dark, at the time they opt to take a walk and they can’t find the water. The beach is there, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and salt, waves crash, but the sea is a ghost, or a different entity and more dreadful. It is simply profoundly ominous and whenever I travel to a beach after dark I remember this narrative that destroyed the ocean after dark for me – positively.

The recent spouses – she’s very young, the husband is older – return to their lodging and learn why the bells ring, during a prolonged scene of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and death-and-the-maiden meets dance of death bedlam. It’s an unnerving meditation about longing and decay, two people aging together as partners, the bond and brutality and gentleness within wedlock.

Not merely the most frightening, but perhaps among the finest concise narratives in existence, and an individual preference. I encountered it en español, in the first edition of Aickman stories to be published in this country several years back.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I read this book near the water overseas a few years ago. Despite the sunshine I sensed cold creep over me. I also felt the electricity of anticipation. I was composing my third novel, and I had hit a block. I wasn’t sure whether there existed any good way to write some of the fearful things the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I saw that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a grim journey into the thoughts of a murderer, Quentin P, based on a notorious figure, the murderer who murdered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in the Midwest during a specific period. As is well-known, this person was obsessed with creating a zombie sex slave who would never leave with him and carried out several macabre trials to achieve this.

The deeds the novel describes are horrific, but similarly terrifying is its own emotional authenticity. The character’s terrible, broken reality is directly described in spare prose, identities hidden. The reader is immersed caught in his thoughts, forced to witness thoughts and actions that appal. The alien nature of his psyche feels like a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Entering this book is not just reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I sleepwalked and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. Once, the fear involved a vision where I was stuck inside a container and, as I roused, I found that I had removed a piece from the window, trying to get out. That house was decaying; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall flooded, maggots fell from the ceiling onto the bed, and on one occasion a large rat ascended the window coverings in that space.

After an acquaintance handed me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living with my parents, but the story regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar in my view, nostalgic at that time. This is a novel featuring a possessed noisy, emotional house and a young woman who consumes chalk from the shoreline. I adored the novel so much and returned again and again to its pages, each time discovering {something