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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by a master of suspense

I read this tale some time back and it has stayed with me ever since. The so-called seasonal visitors turn out to be a family from New York, who lease the same isolated country cottage every summer. On this occasion, in place of heading back to the city, they opt to extend their stay an extra month – an action that appears to unsettle each resident in the nearby town. All pass on a similar vague warning that no one has ever stayed by the water past Labor Day. Nonetheless, the Allisons are resolved to stay, and at that point events begin to get increasingly weird. The person who brings oil refuses to sell to them. Nobody will deliver supplies to the cottage, and as the family try to drive into town, their vehicle fails to start. Bad weather approaches, the batteries of their radio die, and as darkness falls, “the two old people crowded closely in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What could be this couple expecting? What do the townspeople understand? Whenever I peruse the writer’s disturbing and inspiring narrative, I’m reminded that the finest fright stems from the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes from a noted author

In this short story a couple go to a typical seaside town where church bells toll the whole time, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and unexplainable. The first extremely terrifying moment takes place during the evening, when they decide to walk around and they fail to see the ocean. The beach is there, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and seawater, waves crash, but the ocean seems phantom, or something else and more dreadful. It is simply profoundly ominous and every time I travel to a beach at night I think about this story that destroyed the ocean after dark for me – in a good way.

The recent spouses – she’s very young, the man is mature – return to the hotel and find out the cause of the ringing, during a prolonged scene of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth intersects with dance of death chaos. It is a disturbing reflection regarding craving and deterioration, two people growing old jointly as spouses, the connection and aggression and tenderness within wedlock.

Not only the most terrifying, but likely among the finest brief tales out there, and a beloved choice. I encountered it en español, in the first edition of this author’s works to be released in this country a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this narrative by a pool in the French countryside in 2020. Although it was sunny I experienced cold creep over me. I also felt the electricity of excitement. I was writing my third novel, and I faced an obstacle. I was uncertain if there was an effective approach to compose various frightening aspects the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I saw that it was possible.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a bleak exploration within the psyche of a murderer, Quentin P, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who murdered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in a city between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, the killer was fixated with creating a zombie sex slave that would remain with him and made many horrific efforts to accomplish it.

The acts the story tells are terrible, but similarly terrifying is its own psychological persuasiveness. The protagonist’s dreadful, broken reality is simply narrated using minimal words, names redacted. The reader is immersed caught in his thoughts, compelled to observe mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The strangeness of his psyche feels like a bodily jolt – or being stranded in an empty realm. Starting this story is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from a gifted writer

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. Once, the fear involved a dream during which I was trapped within an enclosure and, upon awakening, I discovered that I had removed a part from the window, attempting to escape. That house was falling apart; during heavy rain the ground floor corridor filled with water, insect eggs fell from the ceiling on to my parents’ bed, and at one time a big rodent scaled the curtains in my sister’s room.

When a friend presented me with the story, I was no longer living at my family home, but the tale about the home located on the coastline appeared known in my view, nostalgic at that time. It’s a novel featuring a possessed noisy, emotional house and a girl who ingests limestone from the cliffs. I adored the story immensely and returned repeatedly to the story, always finding {something