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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense

I discovered this narrative some time back and it has lingered with me since then. The named vacationers are a family from the city, who rent a particular remote country cottage each year. On this occasion, in place of heading back home, they opt to extend their stay a few more weeks – an action that appears to disturb everyone in the nearby town. Everyone conveys the same veiled caution that not a soul has ever stayed in the area after the holiday. Even so, the Allisons insist to remain, and that’s when things start to grow more bizarre. The person who delivers fuel declines to provide for them. Not a single person will deliver groceries to the cottage, and at the time they attempt to drive into town, the car refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the energy in the radio die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple clung to each other within their rental and waited”. What could be this couple waiting for? What do the townspeople know? Every time I peruse this author’s disturbing and thought-provoking narrative, I remember that the best horror originates in that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman

In this short story a couple journey to a common coastal village in which chimes sound continuously, a constant chiming that is irritating and inexplicable. The initial very scary scene occurs at night, as they choose to go for a stroll and they can’t find the sea. Sand is present, there’s the smell of rotting fish and salt, surf is audible, but the ocean appears spectral, or another thing and worse. It is truly deeply malevolent and every time I travel to a beach at night I recall this tale which spoiled the beach in the evening to my mind – in a good way.

The newlyweds – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – head back to the inn and learn why the bells ring, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and mortality and youth encounters grim ballet bedlam. It’s an unnerving meditation on desire and deterioration, two people aging together as a couple, the bond and brutality and affection within wedlock.

Not merely the scariest, but probably a top example of brief tales out there, and a beloved choice. I encountered it in Spanish, in the first edition of this author’s works to be released in this country a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this narrative near the water in France recently. Although it was sunny I experienced a chill within me. I also felt the electricity of anticipation. I was writing my latest book, and I encountered a block. I was uncertain if it was possible an effective approach to write certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Experiencing this novel, I realized that it was possible.

Published in 1995, the novel is a bleak exploration within the psyche of a murderer, Quentin P, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who murdered and dismembered numerous individuals in the Midwest over a decade. Notoriously, the killer was obsessed with producing a compliant victim who would stay by his side and attempted numerous macabre trials to accomplish it.

The acts the novel describes are appalling, but just as scary is its own psychological persuasiveness. The character’s terrible, broken reality is simply narrated with concise language, names redacted. The reader is plunged caught in his thoughts, forced to observe mental processes and behaviors that appal. The strangeness of his psyche feels like a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated on a desolate planet. Starting this story is not just reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and eventually began having night terrors. On one occasion, the horror involved a nightmare where I was confined within an enclosure and, as I roused, I discovered that I had torn off the slat from the window, seeking to leave. That home was crumbling; when it rained heavily the ground floor corridor became inundated, maggots fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and once a big rodent scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

When a friend presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out at my family home, but the tale regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to me, longing as I felt. This is a story concerning a ghostly loud, emotional house and a female character who eats chalk off the rocks. I cherished the novel so much and returned again and again to the story, consistently uncovering {something