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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense

I encountered this tale years ago and it has haunted me since then. The so-called vacationers turn out to be a couple from the city, who lease an identical isolated rural cabin every summer. During this visit, in place of heading back to the city, they decide to lengthen their vacation a few more weeks – an action that appears to alarm everyone in the adjacent village. All pass on a similar vague warning that no one has lingered in the area beyond the holiday. Regardless, the Allisons insist to stay, and that is the moment things start to get increasingly weird. The man who delivers fuel refuses to sell for them. No one is willing to supply food to the cabin, and at the time the family attempt to go to the village, the automobile fails to start. A storm gathers, the energy of their radio diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the aged individuals huddled together inside their cabin and anticipated”. What might be this couple expecting? What do the locals know? Whenever I peruse the writer’s chilling and inspiring tale, I remember that the best horror comes from the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes from a noted author

In this brief tale a pair journey to a typical beach community where church bells toll constantly, a constant chiming that is annoying and unexplainable. The opening truly frightening episode occurs during the evening, when they opt to go for a stroll and they fail to see the sea. There’s sand, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and seawater, surf is audible, but the ocean is a ghost, or something else and even more alarming. It’s just insanely sinister and each occasion I go to the coast at night I think about this narrative which spoiled the beach in the evening to my mind – positively.

The young couple – 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 mortality and youth encounters dance of death pandemonium. It is a disturbing meditation about longing and decline, a pair of individuals maturing in tandem as a couple, the bond and brutality and affection of marriage.

Not just the most frightening, but probably a top example of concise narratives available, and an individual preference. I read it in Spanish, in the debut release of these tales to be released in this country a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates

I perused Zombie by a pool in the French countryside recently. Although it was sunny I sensed a chill within me. I also felt the electricity of fascination. I was composing my latest book, and I faced an obstacle. I was uncertain whether there existed an effective approach to compose certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Going through this book, I realized that it could be done.

Released decades ago, the novel is a grim journey through the mind of a young serial killer, the main character, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who slaughtered and cut apart 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, this person was obsessed with producing a compliant victim that would remain with him and attempted numerous macabre trials to accomplish it.

The deeds the story tells are horrific, but equally frightening is its own psychological persuasiveness. The character’s dreadful, broken reality is simply narrated using minimal words, names redacted. You is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, compelled to observe thoughts and actions that shock. The strangeness of his mind is like a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Entering this book feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and later started having night terrors. At one point, the terror featured a dream in which I was stuck within an enclosure and, upon awakening, I discovered that I had removed a piece out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That house was falling apart; when storms came the entranceway flooded, insect eggs came down from the roof into the bedroom, and at one time a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in my sister’s room.

After an acquaintance gave me this author’s book, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the narrative regarding the building perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable to myself, homesick as I was. It is a story featuring a possessed noisy, atmospheric home and a young woman who ingests calcium from the cliffs. I loved the story deeply and went back repeatedly to the story, always finding {something