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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson

I encountered this tale years ago and it has lingered with me ever since. The so-called vacationers turn out to be the Allisons from the city, who rent a particular off-grid rural cabin every summer. This time, rather than going back home, they opt to extend their holiday a few more weeks – something that seems to disturb each resident in the adjacent village. All pass on the same veiled caution that nobody has ever stayed by the water after the end of summer. Nonetheless, the Allisons are resolved to remain, and at that point things start to grow more bizarre. The person who supplies the kerosene won’t sell to them. Not a single person is willing to supply food to the cabin, and when the Allisons try to travel to the community, the automobile refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the power in the radio diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the aged individuals crowded closely in their summer cottage and expected”. What could be this couple waiting for? What could the locals know? Whenever I read the writer’s unnerving and thought-provoking narrative, I recall that the finest fright stems from what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes from a noted author

In this concise narrative a pair go to a common coastal village in which chimes sound constantly, an incessant ringing that is annoying and unexplainable. The initial extremely terrifying episode takes place after dark, at the time they decide to take a walk and they fail to see the ocean. There’s sand, there is the odor of rotting fish and brine, there are waves, but the water appears spectral, or a different entity and even more alarming. It’s just profoundly ominous and every time I travel to the shore in the evening I think about this story that ruined the beach in the evening in my view – in a good way.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – return to the inn and find out the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of confinement, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth meets danse macabre chaos. It is a disturbing reflection on desire and deterioration, two bodies maturing in tandem as spouses, the connection and brutality and tenderness of marriage.

Not just the scariest, but probably among the finest concise narratives out there, and an individual preference. I encountered it en español, in the first edition of these tales to appear locally a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I delved into Zombie by a pool in the French countryside a few years ago. Although it was sunny I experienced cold creep within me. Additionally, I sensed the electricity of excitement. I was working on my third novel, and I had hit an obstacle. I was uncertain if there was any good way to craft various frightening aspects the story includes. Reading Zombie, I realized that it could be done.

Released decades ago, the story is a dark flight within the psyche of a criminal, Quentin P, modeled after an infamous individual, the murderer who murdered and cut apart 17 young men and boys in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, the killer was obsessed with creating a zombie sex slave who would stay by his side and carried out several horrific efforts to achieve this.

The actions the novel describes are appalling, but just as scary is the emotional authenticity. Quentin P’s awful, shattered existence is plainly told using minimal words, identities hidden. You is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, forced to observe mental processes and behaviors that shock. The foreignness of his thinking feels like a bodily jolt – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Going into Zombie is not just reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from a gifted writer

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and subsequently commenced suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the horror included a vision during which I was stuck in a box and, upon awakening, I found that I had ripped the slat from the window, seeking to leave. That house was falling apart; when storms came the ground floor corridor became inundated, insect eggs dropped from above into the bedroom, and at one time a large rat climbed the drapes in that space.

After an acquaintance handed me the story, I was no longer living at my family home, but the story regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable in my view, homesick as I was. It is a story about a haunted noisy, sentimental building and a girl who consumes limestone from the shoreline. I cherished the story immensely and returned frequently to its pages, each time discovering {something