🔗 Share this article

Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by a master of suspense

I discovered this narrative long ago and it has stayed with me ever since. The so-called seasonal visitors are a family from the city, who rent the same isolated rural cabin each year. On this occasion, in place of returning to the city, they choose to lengthen their holiday an extra month – an action that appears to unsettle each resident in the surrounding community. Each repeats a similar vague warning that not a soul has remained in the area past the holiday. Regardless, the couple are resolved to remain, and at that point situations commence to grow more bizarre. The individual who supplies the kerosene refuses to sell to them. Not a single person is willing to supply supplies to the cottage, and when the family try to drive into town, the car won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the power in the radio die, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals clung to each other inside their cabin and waited”. What might be this couple anticipating? What might the townspeople know? Every time I peruse this author’s unnerving and thought-provoking story, I remember that the finest fright comes from the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a pair travel to a common seaside town where church bells toll constantly, a perpetual pealing that is annoying and puzzling. The first very scary moment happens after dark, at the time they decide to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the ocean. There’s sand, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and salt, surf is audible, but the water appears spectral, or a different entity and worse. It is simply insanely sinister and every time I travel to the coast after dark I recall this story that destroyed the sea at night in my view – in a good way.

The recent spouses – she’s very young, the husband is older – head back to the hotel and learn why the bells ring, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and mortality and youth intersects with dance of death pandemonium. It is a disturbing meditation about longing and deterioration, two people maturing in tandem as a couple, the attachment and violence and gentleness in matrimony.

Not only the most frightening, but perhaps among the finest concise narratives out there, and a beloved choice. I read it en español, in the debut release of Aickman stories to appear in this country a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

Zombie from an esteemed writer

I perused this narrative by a pool overseas recently. Despite the sunshine I felt a chill within me. Additionally, I sensed the thrill of anticipation. I was working on my third novel, and I encountered a block. I wasn’t sure whether there existed an effective approach to compose various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Experiencing this novel, I understood that there was a way.

Released decades ago, the book is a dark flight within the psyche of a murderer, Quentin P, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who killed and cut apart numerous individuals in the Midwest over a decade. Infamously, Dahmer was fixated with creating a submissive individual who would stay him and carried out several macabre trials to accomplish it.

The acts the book depicts are appalling, but equally frightening is the mental realism. The character’s dreadful, fragmented world is plainly told in spare prose, names redacted. The audience is plunged trapped in his consciousness, forced to see thoughts and actions that horrify. The foreignness of his psyche feels like a bodily jolt – or getting lost on a desolate planet. Entering this book is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I walked in my sleep and later started suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the fear included a dream during which I was confined within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I realized that I had removed a part off the window, seeking to leave. That home was decaying; when storms came the entranceway became inundated, insect eggs fell from the ceiling on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a big rodent ascended the window coverings in my sister’s room.

Once a companion handed me this author’s book, I was residing elsewhere at my family home, but the narrative about the home high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to me, homesick at that time. It is a book about a haunted noisy, sentimental building and a girl who ingests calcium off the rocks. I loved the novel deeply and came back repeatedly to its pages, always finding {something