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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from a master of suspense

I discovered this story long ago and it has haunted me from that moment. The so-called vacationers turn out to be the Allisons urban dwellers, who occupy the same isolated lakeside house every summer. During this visit, in place of going back to urban life, they decide to prolong their stay a few more weeks – a decision that to alarm each resident in the surrounding community. Each repeats the same veiled caution that not a soul has ever stayed by the water beyond the holiday. Even so, they are determined to remain, and that’s when things start to become stranger. The man who supplies the kerosene declines to provide to them. Nobody agrees to bring groceries to the cabin, and when the family try to travel to the community, their vehicle won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the batteries within the device fade, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple clung to each other within their rental and waited”. What could be this couple expecting? What could the residents be aware of? Each occasion I revisit this author’s disturbing and influential narrative, I’m reminded that the finest fright comes from what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from a noted author

In this short story a pair travel to a typical coastal village in which chimes sound continuously, an incessant ringing that is annoying and puzzling. The initial very scary moment occurs after dark, as they choose to take a walk and they are unable to locate the water. There’s sand, the scent exists of rotting fish and brine, surf is audible, but the water seems phantom, or a different entity and more dreadful. It is truly insanely sinister and every time I travel to the shore after dark I recall this narrative that ruined the ocean after dark for me – in a good way.

The young couple – she’s very young, the man is mature – head back to their lodging and discover why the bells ring, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and demise and innocence meets dance of death pandemonium. It’s an unnerving reflection about longing and decline, two bodies growing old jointly as a couple, the attachment and aggression and affection within wedlock.

Not merely the scariest, but likely among the finest concise narratives in existence, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of these tales to be published in this country a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

Zombie from an esteemed writer

I read Zombie beside the swimming area in the French countryside recently. Even with the bright weather I felt a chill over me. I also felt the excitement of excitement. I was writing a new project, and I faced a block. I wasn’t sure whether there existed any good way to compose some of the fearful things the book contains. Going through this book, I realized that it was possible.

Published in 1995, the novel is a dark flight through the mind of a criminal, the main character, based on an infamous individual, the murderer who killed and cut apart numerous individuals in a city over a decade. As is well-known, the killer was obsessed with producing a submissive individual who would stay by his side and carried out several grisly attempts to achieve this.

The acts the story tells are appalling, but just as scary is the emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s awful, fragmented world is directly described using minimal words, identities hidden. The reader is immersed trapped in his consciousness, compelled to see ideas and deeds that shock. The foreignness of his mind feels like a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Entering Zombie feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel by a gifted writer

In my early years, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the horror involved a vision in which I was confined in a box and, upon awakening, I found that I had ripped the slat off the window, trying to get out. That home was falling apart; during heavy rain the entranceway became inundated, insect eggs fell from the ceiling on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a big rodent climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.

After an acquaintance gave me this author’s book, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the narrative of the house located on the coastline seemed recognizable in my view, homesick as I felt. It is a story concerning a ghostly noisy, atmospheric home and a female character who consumes chalk from the shoreline. I cherished the book immensely and returned again and again to the story, each time discovering {something