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A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I read this story years ago and it has stayed with me from that moment. The so-called vacationers turn out to be a couple from the city, who rent the same off-grid country cottage each year. On this occasion, rather than returning home, they decide to lengthen their stay a few more weeks – something that seems to unsettle everyone in the nearby town. All pass on an identical cryptic advice that nobody has lingered at the lake after the holiday. Even so, the couple insist to not leave, and that is the moment events begin to get increasingly weird. The individual who delivers the kerosene declines to provide to the couple. Nobody will deliver groceries to the cabin, and as the Allisons try to travel to the community, the automobile won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the energy of their radio diminish, and as darkness falls, “the two old people crowded closely within their rental and anticipated”. What are the Allisons waiting for? What could the locals understand? Each occasion I revisit this author’s disturbing and thought-provoking tale, I recall that the best horror originates in what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this short story two people go to an ordinary beach community where church bells toll the whole time, a constant chiming that is irritating and unexplainable. The opening truly frightening episode happens during the evening, as they opt to take a walk and they fail to see the water. The beach is there, there is the odor of putrid marine life and brine, surf is audible, but the ocean appears spectral, or something else and worse. It is simply insanely sinister and each occasion I travel to the shore after dark I recall this narrative that ruined the sea at night to my mind – in a good way.

The young couple – she’s very young, the man is mature – head back to their lodging and find out the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden encounters danse macabre bedlam. It is a disturbing reflection regarding craving and deterioration, a pair of individuals aging together as a couple, the bond and aggression and gentleness of marriage.

Not merely the most frightening, but perhaps among the finest brief tales out there, and an individual preference. I read it in Spanish, in the first edition of this author’s works to be published locally several years back.

Catriona Ward

Zombie from an esteemed writer

I read this narrative beside the swimming area in France in 2020. Although it was sunny I felt an icy feeling within me. I also experienced the excitement of fascination. I was writing my third novel, and I faced a block. I wasn’t sure whether there existed any good way to compose certain terrifying elements the book contains. Experiencing this novel, I realized that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a bleak exploration within the psyche of a young serial killer, the protagonist, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who killed and dismembered numerous individuals in Milwaukee over a decade. As is well-known, Dahmer was obsessed with making a zombie sex slave that would remain with him and attempted numerous horrific efforts to achieve this.

The actions the novel describes are horrific, but equally frightening is its own mental realism. Quentin P’s terrible, fragmented world is simply narrated using minimal words, names redacted. The audience is sunk deep stuck in his mind, forced to see mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The strangeness of his psyche feels like a tangible impact – or being stranded in an empty realm. Going into this book is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and later started having night terrors. At one point, the terror included a nightmare during which I was stuck within an enclosure and, as I roused, I discovered that I had removed a piece from the window, attempting to escape. That building was falling apart; when storms came the ground floor corridor became inundated, maggots fell from the ceiling onto the bed, and at one time a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in that space.

Once a companion presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out at my family home, but the tale regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar in my view, longing as I felt. It is a story about a haunted loud, emotional house and a girl who consumes limestone from the shoreline. I cherished the story so much and went back repeatedly to its pages, always finding {something