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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson

I read this story some time back and it has lingered with me from that moment. The titular “summer people” turn out to be a couple from the city, who occupy an identical isolated lakeside house annually. During this visit, rather than returning to the city, they opt to prolong their vacation an extra month – an action that appears to alarm each resident in the surrounding community. All pass on the same veiled caution that not a soul has lingered by the water beyond Labor Day. Regardless, the Allisons are determined to remain, and that’s when things start to become stranger. The man who delivers fuel won’t sell for them. No one is willing to supply food to the cabin, and as the family attempt to go to the village, the automobile fails to start. A tempest builds, the batteries in the radio die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the aged individuals clung to each other within their rental and expected”. What are this couple waiting for? What might the residents understand? Each occasion I revisit the writer’s chilling and influential story, I recall that the top terror comes from that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by a noted author

In this brief tale a couple go to a typical coastal village in which chimes sound the whole time, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and inexplicable. The initial very scary scene occurs at night, when they decide to walk around and they can’t find the water. The beach is there, the scent exists of rotting fish and brine, there are waves, but the ocean seems phantom, or something else and even more alarming. It is truly insanely sinister and whenever I visit to the shore after dark I think about this narrative which spoiled the ocean after dark in my view – in a good way.

The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – go back to their lodging and discover why the bells ring, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and demise and innocence intersects with danse macabre pandemonium. It’s an unnerving meditation regarding craving and deterioration, two bodies aging together as spouses, the connection and aggression and gentleness in matrimony.

Not just the most frightening, but likely a top example of concise narratives in existence, and a beloved choice. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of this author’s works to be released locally a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer

I perused Zombie by a pool in the French countryside in 2020. Despite the sunshine I felt cold creep through me. I also felt the electricity of fascination. I was writing my third novel, and I encountered a wall. I wasn’t sure whether there existed a proper method to compose various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I saw that it was possible.

Published in 1995, the book is a bleak exploration within the psyche of a criminal, Quentin P, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who murdered and dismembered multiple victims in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, Dahmer was fixated with creating a submissive individual who would never leave by his side and carried out several grisly attempts to do so.

The acts the book depicts are terrible, but similarly terrifying is its mental realism. Quentin P’s terrible, fragmented world is directly described with concise language, identities hidden. The audience is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, forced to witness mental processes and behaviors that appal. The alien nature of his thinking is like a tangible impact – or being stranded in an empty realm. Going into this book is not just reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from 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 vision where I was trapped in a box and, upon awakening, I realized that I had torn off a part from the window, attempting to escape. That house was decaying; when storms came the entranceway became inundated, maggots fell from the ceiling on to my parents’ bed, and once a large rat ascended the window coverings in that space.

Once a companion handed me this author’s book, I had moved out with my parents, but the narrative about the home located on the coastline felt familiar to myself, longing at that time. This is a book about a haunted noisy, emotional house and a girl who ingests limestone off the rocks. I loved the book immensely and went back again and again to its pages, each time discovering {something