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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by a master of suspense

I read this story years ago and it has stayed with me since then. The so-called “summer people” turn out to be a family from New York, who lease the same remote lakeside house every summer. On this occasion, in place of heading back to the city, they choose to lengthen their holiday an extra month – something that seems to disturb all the locals in the surrounding community. Each repeats a similar vague warning that nobody has lingered at the lake past the end of summer. Nonetheless, they are determined to stay, and at that point situations commence to become stranger. The man who brings the kerosene refuses to sell for them. Nobody agrees to bring food to the cottage, and at the time they try to go to the village, their vehicle won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the power of their radio die, and when night comes, “the aged individuals huddled together in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What might be the Allisons anticipating? What might the locals be aware of? Whenever I revisit this author’s chilling and thought-provoking narrative, I recall that the finest fright originates in that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by a noted author

In this brief tale two people go to a typical beach community in which chimes sound the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is irritating and inexplicable. The first extremely terrifying scene happens during the evening, at the time they choose to take a walk and they fail to see the sea. The beach is there, there is the odor of rotting fish and seawater, waves crash, but the ocean is a ghost, or something else and even more alarming. It’s just deeply malevolent and each occasion I visit to a beach after dark I remember this tale that destroyed the ocean after dark in my view – in a good way.

The recent spouses – the wife is youthful, the husband is older – head back to the hotel and find out the reason for the chiming, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and demise and innocence intersects with dance of death bedlam. It’s an unnerving meditation regarding craving and decay, two people aging together as partners, the connection and brutality and tenderness in matrimony.

Not just the scariest, but likely one of the best concise narratives out there, and a beloved choice. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of these tales to be released in Argentina in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates

I read this narrative by a pool in the French countryside recently. Even with the bright weather I experienced a chill through me. I also experienced the thrill of excitement. I was composing my third novel, and I encountered an obstacle. I was uncertain if there was an effective approach to write certain terrifying elements the story includes. Going through this book, I understood that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a grim journey through the mind of a young serial killer, Quentin P, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who slaughtered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee during a specific period. Notoriously, Dahmer was consumed with producing a compliant victim who would stay by his side and attempted numerous macabre trials to achieve this.

The actions the story tells are terrible, but similarly terrifying is its mental realism. Quentin P’s awful, shattered existence is plainly told using minimal words, names redacted. The reader is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, compelled to see thoughts and actions that horrify. The strangeness of his thinking feels like a tangible impact – or getting lost on a desolate planet. Starting this book is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

During my youth, I walked in my sleep and later started suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the horror involved a nightmare where I was trapped in a box and, upon awakening, I realized that I had torn off a part from the window, trying to get out. That home was falling apart; when it rained heavily the ground floor corridor filled with water, maggots dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a large rat scaled the curtains in that space.

After an acquaintance gave me this author’s book, I had moved out at my family home, but the tale of the house high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable in my view, longing as I felt. This is a novel featuring a possessed loud, sentimental building and a female character who consumes limestone off the rocks. I adored the novel so much and returned repeatedly to its pages, always finding {something