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A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I discovered this narrative long ago and it has lingered with me ever since. The named “summer people” happen to be a couple from the city, who occupy an identical isolated country cottage every summer. During this visit, rather than going back to urban life, they choose to extend their holiday a few more weeks – an action that appears to unsettle all the locals in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that no one has ever stayed by the water after the holiday. Nonetheless, the couple are resolved to not leave, and at that point situations commence to become stranger. The man who supplies the kerosene declines to provide to them. No one is willing to supply groceries to the cabin, and when they try to go to the village, their vehicle fails to start. A storm gathers, the batteries of their radio fade, and when night comes, “the aged individuals crowded closely within their rental and anticipated”. What are this couple waiting for? What could the townspeople be aware of? Every time I read this author’s unnerving and thought-provoking story, I remember that the finest fright originates in that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by a noted author

In this concise narrative two people go to an ordinary coastal village where bells ring constantly, a constant chiming that is irritating and unexplainable. The opening truly frightening moment happens after dark, at the time they opt to go for a stroll and they fail to see the sea. There’s sand, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and seawater, there are waves, but the ocean seems phantom, or another thing and more dreadful. It is simply deeply malevolent and each occasion I travel to the shore in the evening I recall this story which spoiled the beach in the evening to my mind – favorably.

The young couple – she’s very young, the man is mature – head back to the inn and discover the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of confinement, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden encounters grim ballet chaos. It is a disturbing reflection regarding craving and decline, a pair of individuals maturing in tandem as a couple, the connection and violence and affection within wedlock.

Not only the most frightening, but likely among the finest short stories available, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in Spanish, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to be published locally several years back.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates

I read this narrative near the water in France in 2020. Although it was sunny I experienced cold creep over me. I also experienced the excitement of fascination. I was writing my latest book, and I encountered a wall. I didn’t know if there was any good way to compose some of the fearful things the book contains. Going through this book, I realized that it was possible.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a bleak exploration within the psyche of a criminal, the protagonist, modeled after a notorious figure, the serial killer who killed and cut apart numerous individuals in Milwaukee during a specific period. As is well-known, Dahmer was consumed with producing a compliant victim who would stay by his side and carried out several grisly attempts to do so.

The acts the novel describes are appalling, but just as scary is its mental realism. The protagonist’s dreadful, fragmented world is plainly told with concise language, details omitted. The audience is immersed trapped in his consciousness, compelled to witness mental processes and behaviors that appal. The alien nature of his psyche resembles a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated on a desolate planet. Going into Zombie feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and subsequently commenced experiencing nightmares. Once, the terror featured a dream during which I was trapped inside a container and, when I woke up, I realized that I had ripped the slat out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That building was decaying; when storms came the downstairs hall filled with water, fly larvae came down from the roof into the bedroom, and once a big rodent ascended the window coverings in my sister’s room.

When a friend gave me the story, I was no longer living with my parents, but the story of the house high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to me, nostalgic at that time. It is a story concerning a ghostly loud, sentimental building and a female character who eats chalk from the cliffs. I cherished the story immensely and came back again and again to its pages, consistently uncovering {something