🔗 Share this article

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson

I read this narrative years ago and it has stayed with me since then. The so-called vacationers turn out to be a family from the city, who rent an identical off-grid country cottage annually. During this visit, rather than going back to the city, they decide to lengthen their vacation an extra month – an action that appears to unsettle everyone in the nearby town. All pass on the same veiled caution that no one has ever stayed at the lake beyond Labor Day. Regardless, the Allisons are determined to not leave, and that is the moment situations commence to get increasingly weird. The individual who brings oil won’t sell to the couple. Nobody will deliver food to the cabin, and as the Allisons endeavor to drive into town, the car fails to start. A storm gathers, the power in the radio fade, and when night comes, “the elderly couple crowded closely inside their cabin and waited”. What might be the Allisons anticipating? What might the residents know? Each occasion I read the writer’s disturbing and influential narrative, I’m reminded that the finest fright originates in that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a couple journey to a typical beach community where bells ring continuously, a constant chiming that is bothersome and puzzling. The opening extremely terrifying scene happens at night, as they opt to take a walk and they can’t find the sea. There’s sand, the scent exists of rotting fish and brine, waves crash, but the ocean seems phantom, or another thing and more dreadful. It’s just profoundly ominous and every time I go to the shore after dark I recall this tale that ruined the ocean after dark to my mind – in a good way.

The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, the husband is older – head back to the hotel and learn the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and death-and-the-maiden meets dance of death chaos. It’s an unnerving contemplation about longing and decay, a pair of individuals maturing in tandem as a couple, the bond and aggression and gentleness in matrimony.

Not merely the most terrifying, but likely among the finest concise narratives out there, and a personal favourite. I read it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of these tales to be released locally several years back.

Catriona Ward

Zombie from an esteemed writer

I delved into this book by a pool in France in 2020. Although it was sunny I sensed an icy feeling through me. I also felt the thrill of anticipation. I was writing my latest book, and I encountered a block. I wasn’t sure whether there existed any good way to write some of the fearful things the story includes. Going through this book, I saw that there was a way.

Published in 1995, the novel is a grim journey through the mind of a murderer, the protagonist, based on an infamous individual, the criminal who killed and mutilated 17 young men and boys in the Midwest over a decade. Notoriously, Dahmer was consumed with producing a compliant victim who would never leave with him and carried out several macabre trials to achieve this.

The acts the book depicts are terrible, but just as scary is its psychological persuasiveness. The character’s dreadful, broken reality is directly described using minimal words, details omitted. You is plunged trapped in his consciousness, forced to witness mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The foreignness of his mind resembles a bodily jolt – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Starting Zombie is less like reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel by a gifted writer

During my youth, I walked in my sleep and eventually began having night terrors. On one occasion, the fear featured a vision in which I was trapped inside a container and, as I roused, I discovered that I had ripped the slat out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That home was falling apart; when it rained heavily the entranceway filled with water, maggots came down from the roof into the bedroom, and at one time a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

After an acquaintance handed me the story, I had moved out at my family home, but the tale about the home high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to myself, homesick as I felt. This is a book featuring a possessed noisy, atmospheric home and a young woman who eats limestone off the rocks. I loved the novel so much and went back repeatedly to the story, always finding {something