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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense

I discovered this tale long ago and it has haunted me from that moment. The titular “summer people” turn out to be a couple from the city, who rent a particular off-grid rural cabin each year. On this occasion, instead of going back to the city, they decide to extend their holiday for a month longer – an action that appears to unsettle each resident in the surrounding community. Each repeats the same veiled caution that not a soul has ever stayed in the area beyond Labor Day. Regardless, the Allisons are resolved to not leave, and that’s when situations commence to grow more bizarre. The man who delivers fuel refuses to sell for them. Nobody will deliver food to the cottage, and when they endeavor to travel to the community, their vehicle fails to start. A tempest builds, the batteries of their radio diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the aged individuals crowded closely within their rental and waited”. What might be the Allisons expecting? What might the residents understand? Each occasion I peruse the writer’s chilling and thought-provoking story, I recall that the best horror originates in what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from a noted author

In this short story a pair go to a common coastal village in which chimes sound constantly, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and unexplainable. The first truly frightening episode occurs after dark, at the time they decide to walk around and they can’t find the sea. The beach is there, there is the odor of rotting fish and brine, there are waves, but the sea is a ghost, or another thing and even more alarming. It is simply deeply malevolent and every time I go to the coast after dark I remember this narrative that ruined the ocean after dark to my mind – in a good way.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, he’s not – head back to the hotel and learn the reason for the chiming, during a prolonged scene of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and mortality and youth encounters dance of death bedlam. It is a disturbing reflection regarding craving and decline, two people aging together as partners, the bond and violence and tenderness within wedlock.

Not merely the most frightening, but perhaps among the finest concise narratives in existence, and an individual preference. I read it en español, in the first edition of this author’s works to be released in this country in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer

I delved into this book beside the swimming area in the French countryside a few years ago. Although it was sunny I felt an icy feeling over me. Additionally, I sensed the thrill of excitement. I was writing my latest book, and I encountered a block. I was uncertain if it was possible a proper method to write certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Experiencing this novel, I realized that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the story is a dark flight into the thoughts of a young serial killer, the protagonist, based on an infamous individual, the serial killer who murdered and mutilated numerous individuals in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, this person was consumed with making a zombie sex slave who would never leave with him and carried out several horrific efforts to achieve this.

The actions the novel describes are appalling, but just as scary is its own mental realism. The protagonist’s dreadful, broken reality is directly described using minimal words, names redacted. You is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, compelled to observe mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The strangeness of his thinking resembles a physical shock – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Going into this story feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and later started suffering from bad dreams. Once, the horror involved a dream in which I was trapped within an enclosure and, as I roused, I found that I had torn off the slat from the window, seeking to leave. That building was crumbling; when storms came the downstairs hall became inundated, insect eggs dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in my sister’s room.

When a friend gave me the story, I was residing elsewhere at my family home, but the tale of the house high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to myself, longing as I felt. It is a book concerning a ghostly loud, emotional house and a female character who consumes calcium from the shoreline. I cherished the story so much and came back repeatedly to the story, each time discovering {something