Andrew Michael Hurley
A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson
I discovered this tale some time back and it has lingered with me from that moment. The named vacationers turn out to be the Allisons urban dwellers, who rent an identical off-grid lakeside house each year. On this occasion, in place of going back to urban life, they decide to extend their vacation for a month longer – a decision that to unsettle each resident in the nearby town. Everyone conveys the same veiled caution that nobody has remained in the area past the holiday. Regardless, the Allisons insist to not leave, and that’s when things start to become stranger. The individual who supplies fuel won’t sell for them. Nobody is willing to supply food to the cabin, and when the Allisons attempt to travel to the community, the automobile refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the batteries in the radio die, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple crowded closely inside their cabin and expected”. What might be they expecting? What could the locals be aware of? Every time I read this author’s unnerving and thought-provoking narrative, I remember that the best horror originates in that which remains hidden.
Mariana Enríquez
An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman
In this short story a pair journey to a common coastal village where bells ring the whole time, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and inexplicable. The initial very scary scene happens at night, as they choose to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the ocean. There’s sand, there is the odor of rotting fish and brine, waves crash, but the sea is a ghost, or another thing and more dreadful. It is simply profoundly ominous and every time I travel to the coast after dark I remember this story that destroyed the beach in the evening for me – in a good way.
The recent spouses – she’s very young, he’s not – head back to their lodging and discover the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden intersects with dance of death pandemonium. It’s an unnerving reflection regarding craving and decline, two people growing old jointly as partners, the bond and aggression and tenderness of marriage.
Not only the scariest, but probably one of the best brief tales out there, and a beloved choice. I read it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of these tales to appear in this country in 2011.
Catriona Ward
Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates
I read this book by a pool overseas recently. Despite the sunshine I sensed a chill within me. I also experienced the thrill of anticipation. I was writing my latest book, and I faced a wall. I wasn’t sure if it was possible any good way to compose certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Experiencing this novel, I saw that it was possible.
Published in 1995, the book is a dark flight within the psyche of a criminal, Quentin P, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who slaughtered and mutilated multiple victims in the Midwest during a specific period. Notoriously, this person was consumed with making a submissive individual who would stay by his side and attempted numerous horrific efforts to accomplish it.
The actions the book depicts are terrible, but just as scary is its psychological persuasiveness. The character’s awful, broken reality is directly described with concise language, names redacted. The audience is immersed caught in his thoughts, compelled to see mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The foreignness of his psyche resembles a physical shock – or getting lost in an empty realm. Going into this story is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.
Daisy Johnson
White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi
During my youth, I sleepwalked and later started experiencing nightmares. On one occasion, the terror involved a dream where I was confined in a box and, as I roused, I realized that I had removed a part from the window, seeking to leave. That building was crumbling; when it rained heavily the ground floor corridor flooded, fly larvae came down from the roof onto the bed, and on one occasion a big rodent ascended the window coverings in my sister’s room.
After an acquaintance handed me this author’s book, I was no longer living in my childhood residence, but the story regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to me, longing at that time. This is a story about a haunted noisy, emotional house and a female character who consumes calcium off the rocks. I adored the novel so much and went back repeatedly to its pages, each time discovering {something
