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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by a master of suspense

I read this narrative years ago and it has haunted me since then. The named “summer people” happen to be the Allisons from New York, who rent the same off-grid lakeside house every summer. During this visit, rather than heading back home, they opt to lengthen their holiday for a month longer – an action that appears to unsettle everyone in the surrounding community. All pass on the same veiled caution that not a soul has remained at the lake past Labor Day. Regardless, they insist to stay, and at that point things start to grow more bizarre. The person who supplies oil won’t sell to the couple. Nobody will deliver supplies to the cottage, and when the Allisons endeavor to go to the village, the car refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the energy of their radio diminish, and as darkness falls, “the two old people clung to each other inside their cabin and waited”. What could be they anticipating? What do the townspeople understand? Every time I revisit this author’s chilling and inspiring narrative, I’m reminded that the top terror originates in the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this short story a couple journey to a common coastal village in which chimes sound constantly, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and inexplicable. The opening extremely terrifying episode takes place at night, at the time they decide to walk around and they fail to see the sea. Sand is present, there is the odor of rotting fish and salt, there are waves, but the ocean appears spectral, or another thing and even more alarming. It is simply deeply malevolent and whenever I travel to the coast in the evening I think about this story which spoiled the beach in the evening in my view – in a good way.

The young couple – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – return to the inn and discover the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and mortality and youth meets dance of death chaos. It is a disturbing reflection about longing and decline, two people growing old jointly as spouses, the attachment and aggression and gentleness of marriage.

Not merely the scariest, but likely among the finest short stories out there, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in Spanish, in the first edition of Aickman stories to be released locally a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I read this narrative by a pool overseas recently. Even with the bright weather I sensed cold creep through me. I also experienced the thrill of fascination. I was working on my third novel, and I had hit a block. I was uncertain if there was any good way to write some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Experiencing this novel, I saw that there was a way.

Published in 1995, the book is a bleak exploration through the mind of a murderer, the protagonist, inspired by an infamous individual, the criminal who killed and mutilated multiple victims in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, the killer was obsessed with making a compliant victim that would remain with him and attempted numerous grisly attempts to achieve this.

The actions the story tells are horrific, but just as scary is the emotional authenticity. The character’s terrible, shattered existence is plainly told using minimal words, names redacted. The audience is immersed stuck in his mind, compelled to witness mental processes and behaviors that shock. The foreignness of his thinking resembles a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Starting this book is not just reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I sleepwalked and eventually began experiencing nightmares. On one occasion, the fear featured a nightmare during which I was trapped in a box and, when I woke up, I found that I had ripped a part off the window, trying to get out. That house was crumbling; when storms came the entranceway flooded, maggots dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a large rat scaled the curtains in my sister’s room.

After an acquaintance handed me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere at my family home, but the tale regarding the building perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable in my view, homesick as I felt. It is a book about a haunted clamorous, sentimental building and a girl who ingests limestone from the cliffs. I loved the book so much and went back frequently to it, each time discovering {something