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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson

I discovered this tale long ago and it has lingered with me ever since. The named “summer people” turn out to be the Allisons from New York, who lease a particular isolated lakeside house annually. This time, in place of heading back to urban life, they opt to lengthen their vacation for a month longer – something that seems to alarm everyone in the nearby town. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that no one has lingered in the area after Labor Day. Even so, the couple insist to stay, and that is the moment things start to grow more bizarre. The person who brings oil refuses to sell for them. No one will deliver food to the cabin, and as they endeavor to travel to the community, their vehicle refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the energy within the device die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people clung to each other inside their cabin and expected”. What might be the Allisons anticipating? What do the townspeople know? Each occasion I read Jackson’s unnerving and inspiring narrative, I recall that the top terror comes from that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes by a noted author

In this short story two people journey to an ordinary beach community where church bells toll continuously, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and inexplicable. The initial truly frightening scene happens at night, as they decide to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the sea. Sand is present, the scent exists of decaying seafood and salt, there are waves, but the water appears spectral, or another thing and worse. It is simply profoundly ominous and whenever I travel to a beach after dark I remember this narrative that destroyed the beach in the evening to my mind – in a good way.

The newlyweds – the wife is youthful, he’s not – return to the hotel and learn the reason for the chiming, during a prolonged scene of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and mortality and youth encounters danse macabre pandemonium. It’s a chilling reflection regarding craving and decay, a pair of individuals aging together as a couple, the connection and brutality and tenderness in matrimony.

Not only the most frightening, but perhaps a top example of brief tales available, and an individual preference. I read it in Spanish, in the debut release of this author’s works to be released in Argentina a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this book by a pool overseas in 2020. Although it was sunny I felt cold creep within me. Additionally, I sensed the excitement of anticipation. I was writing my latest book, and I had hit a wall. I was uncertain if there was an effective approach to write some of the fearful things the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I saw that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a bleak exploration through the mind of a criminal, the protagonist, based on an infamous individual, the murderer who killed and dismembered 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee during a specific period. Infamously, Dahmer was consumed with producing a compliant victim that would remain with him and made many macabre trials to achieve this.

The deeds the novel describes are horrific, but similarly terrifying is its own mental realism. The protagonist’s terrible, fragmented world is directly described in spare prose, details omitted. The reader is immersed trapped in his consciousness, compelled to see mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The foreignness of his mind is like a physical shock – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Entering this story is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the fear included a nightmare in which I was stuck in a box and, as I roused, I realized that I had removed a part out of the window frame, trying to get out. That building was decaying; when it rained heavily the entranceway became inundated, fly larvae dropped from above onto the bed, and once a big rodent climbed the drapes in that space.

When a friend gave me the story, I had moved out with my parents, but the story of the house high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to me, longing at that time. It’s a book featuring a possessed loud, atmospheric home and a young woman who eats limestone off the rocks. I adored the novel so much and went back frequently to it, each time discovering {something