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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by a master of suspense

I read this tale years ago and it has haunted me from that moment. The named vacationers happen to be a couple from the city, who lease an identical remote lakeside house every summer. During this visit, in place of heading back home, they decide to prolong their vacation for a month longer – something that seems to alarm all the locals in the nearby town. All pass on the same veiled caution that nobody has lingered at the lake past the end of summer. Regardless, they insist to stay, and that is the moment events begin to get increasingly weird. The individual who delivers oil won’t sell to the couple. No one is willing to supply groceries to their home, and as the Allisons endeavor to drive into town, the automobile won’t start. A tempest builds, the power of their radio fade, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple crowded closely inside their cabin and expected”. What could be this couple waiting for? What could the townspeople know? Whenever I peruse the writer’s chilling and thought-provoking story, I remember that the finest fright comes from that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative two people go to a common seaside town where bells ring the whole time, an incessant ringing that is irritating and unexplainable. The first truly frightening scene happens during the evening, when they decide to go for a stroll and they fail to see the sea. Sand is present, the scent exists of rotting fish and seawater, surf is audible, but the sea appears spectral, or another thing and even more alarming. It’s just insanely sinister and every time I visit to the coast after dark I recall this tale that destroyed the ocean after dark in my view – in a good way.

The newlyweds – the wife is youthful, he’s not – go back to the inn and find out why the bells ring, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth meets grim ballet bedlam. It is a disturbing reflection about longing and decay, two people aging together as spouses, the connection and aggression and tenderness of marriage.

Not just the scariest, but likely a top example of concise narratives out there, and a beloved choice. I experienced it in Spanish, in the initial publication of these tales to be published in Argentina a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from an esteemed writer

I read Zombie by a pool in France in 2020. Even with the bright weather I sensed an icy feeling through me. I also experienced the excitement of anticipation. I was composing a new project, and I faced a wall. I wasn’t sure if it was possible any good way to craft some of the fearful things the book contains. Reading Zombie, I understood that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the novel is a dark flight through the mind of a criminal, the protagonist, inspired by a notorious figure, the criminal who murdered and cut apart numerous individuals in Milwaukee during a specific period. As is well-known, this person was obsessed with creating a submissive individual who would stay with him and carried out several macabre trials to accomplish it.

The actions the story tells are terrible, but equally frightening is the psychological persuasiveness. The protagonist’s terrible, broken reality is simply narrated in spare prose, names redacted. The audience is sunk deep stuck in his mind, obliged to observe mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The alien nature of his psyche is like a physical shock – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Starting this book feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel by a gifted writer

In my early years, I walked in my sleep and later started suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the terror included a dream where I was confined in a box and, as I roused, I realized that I had torn off a part out of the window frame, trying to get out. That home was falling apart; when storms came the ground floor corridor became inundated, maggots fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and at one time a big rodent scaled the curtains in that space.

After an acquaintance presented me with this author’s book, I had moved out with my parents, but the narrative of the house located on the coastline appeared known to myself, nostalgic as I was. It’s a book about a haunted loud, sentimental building and a girl who consumes chalk off the rocks. I adored the book deeply and went back frequently to it, consistently uncovering {something