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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by a master of suspense

I encountered this tale some time back and it has stayed with me since then. The named seasonal visitors turn out to be the Allisons urban dwellers, who occupy the same remote country cottage annually. During this visit, rather than going back to urban life, they decide to extend their vacation an extra month – an action that appears to unsettle everyone in the adjacent village. Each repeats an identical cryptic advice that nobody has ever stayed at the lake after Labor Day. Even so, the Allisons are resolved to not leave, and that is the moment situations commence to get increasingly weird. The individual who brings fuel refuses to sell to them. Not a single person agrees to bring food to their home, and when the Allisons attempt to drive into town, the car refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the power within the device diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple crowded closely inside their cabin and expected”. What might be this couple anticipating? What might the residents know? Whenever I read Jackson’s chilling and inspiring narrative, I remember that the best horror originates in that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this short story a couple travel to a common seaside town where church bells toll constantly, a constant chiming that is irritating and unexplainable. The opening truly frightening episode takes place at night, at the time they decide to walk around and they are unable to locate the ocean. Sand is present, the scent exists of putrid marine life and seawater, waves crash, but the sea appears spectral, or another thing and worse. It is simply insanely sinister and whenever I travel to the shore at night I recall this narrative which spoiled the beach in the evening for me – in a good way.

The young couple – she’s very young, the husband is older – return to their lodging and find out the cause of the ringing, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and mortality and youth intersects with danse macabre chaos. It’s an unnerving contemplation on desire and decline, a pair of individuals growing old jointly as partners, the bond and brutality and affection in matrimony.

Not merely the most frightening, but perhaps one of the best short stories in existence, and an individual preference. I read it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to be published locally a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I read this book beside the swimming area overseas in 2020. Despite the sunshine I felt cold creep through me. Additionally, I sensed the thrill of anticipation. I was composing my third novel, and I encountered a block. I didn’t know if there was a proper method to compose certain terrifying elements the story includes. Going through this book, I understood that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a bleak exploration through the mind of a criminal, Quentin P, inspired by an infamous individual, the serial killer who murdered and cut apart multiple victims in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, the killer was consumed with making a compliant victim who would never leave with him and attempted numerous horrific efforts to achieve this.

The deeds the story tells are terrible, but just as scary is the emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s dreadful, shattered existence is simply narrated using minimal words, details omitted. You is plunged stuck in his mind, forced to observe mental processes and behaviors that appal. The strangeness of his psyche feels like a tangible impact – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Entering this story feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from a gifted writer

In my early years, I walked in my sleep and subsequently commenced suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the fear involved a dream during which I was stuck inside a container and, upon awakening, I discovered that I had ripped a part out of the window frame, trying to get out. That building was decaying; when it rained heavily the ground floor corridor became inundated, maggots dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and once a large rat ascended the window coverings in the bedroom.

Once a companion gave me the story, I was no longer living at my family home, but the tale of the house high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to me, longing as I felt. This is a book concerning a ghostly clamorous, emotional house and a young woman who ingests calcium off the rocks. I cherished the book so much and went back again and again to its pages, each time discovering {something