🔗 Share this article

Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from a master of suspense

I encountered this tale years ago and it has haunted me ever since. The titular seasonal visitors turn out to be the Allisons urban dwellers, who occupy a particular off-grid rural cabin annually. This time, instead of heading back to urban life, they choose to extend their vacation for a month longer – an action that appears to alarm all the locals in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that no one has remained by the water past Labor Day. Even so, they insist to remain, and that’s when things start to get increasingly weird. The person who brings fuel declines to provide to the couple. Not a single person agrees to bring supplies to the cabin, and at the time the family attempt to drive into town, the car refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the batteries in the radio fade, and when night comes, “the two old people crowded closely inside their cabin and anticipated”. What might be the Allisons anticipating? What might the residents know? Whenever I read the writer’s disturbing and inspiring story, I recall that the top terror originates in that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by a noted author

In this concise narrative two people journey to an ordinary beach community where church bells toll constantly, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and inexplicable. The first truly frightening moment takes place at night, at the time they opt to walk around and they can’t find the sea. The beach is there, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and brine, waves crash, but the water is a ghost, or something else and even more alarming. It’s just deeply malevolent and every time I go to a beach at night I remember this narrative which spoiled the sea at night in my view – favorably.

The recent spouses – she’s very young, the husband is older – head back to their lodging and find out the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and demise and innocence meets dance of death pandemonium. It’s an unnerving reflection regarding craving and deterioration, two bodies growing old jointly as a couple, the attachment and violence and tenderness within wedlock.

Not just the most terrifying, but likely a top example of short stories out there, and an individual preference. I read it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of these tales to appear locally several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I read Zombie by a pool in France a few years ago. Despite the sunshine I sensed a chill through me. I also experienced the electricity of anticipation. I was writing my third novel, and I had hit an obstacle. I didn’t know whether there existed an effective approach to write some of the fearful things the story includes. Going through this book, I saw that it could be done.

Published in 1995, the story is a dark flight into the thoughts of a criminal, the protagonist, inspired by an infamous individual, the criminal who killed and dismembered multiple victims in the Midwest over a decade. Infamously, this person was fixated with making a zombie sex slave who would never leave with him and made many horrific efforts to accomplish it.

The acts the story tells are terrible, but equally frightening is its emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s terrible, broken reality is directly described with concise language, details omitted. The reader is plunged caught in his thoughts, compelled to see thoughts and actions that shock. The foreignness of his thinking is like a physical shock – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Going into this story is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from a gifted writer

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and eventually began having night terrors. On one occasion, the terror featured a nightmare in which I was trapped within an enclosure and, as I roused, I found that I had ripped a part off the window, seeking to leave. That house was falling apart; during heavy rain the downstairs hall filled with water, maggots dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and once a big rodent climbed the drapes in the bedroom.

Once a companion gave me the story, I had moved out in my childhood residence, but the narrative about the home located on the coastline appeared known to myself, homesick as I was. It’s a novel concerning a ghostly noisy, emotional house and a girl who ingests limestone from the shoreline. I cherished the book deeply and came back again and again to the story, consistently uncovering {something