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A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I discovered this narrative years ago and it has stayed with me ever since. The named seasonal visitors turn out to be a family from the city, who rent an identical isolated lakeside house each year. During this visit, instead of heading back home, they choose to extend their stay for a month longer – something that seems to alarm each resident in the nearby town. All pass on a similar vague warning that not a soul has ever stayed by the water past Labor Day. Regardless, the couple are resolved to remain, and that is the moment events begin to become stranger. The man who brings fuel declines to provide for them. Not a single person will deliver food to the cabin, and at the time the Allisons try to drive into town, the car fails to start. Bad weather approaches, the power in the radio die, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals crowded closely inside their cabin and anticipated”. What might be this couple waiting for? What might the residents know? Each occasion I read this author’s disturbing and influential story, I’m reminded that the best horror comes from what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative two people journey to an ordinary beach community where bells ring the whole time, a constant chiming that is annoying and inexplicable. The initial very scary moment occurs at night, when they choose to walk around and they fail to see the ocean. Sand is present, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and seawater, waves crash, but the sea is a ghost, or a different entity and worse. It is truly insanely sinister and each occasion I go to the coast after dark I recall this narrative which spoiled the ocean after dark for me – positively.

The newlyweds – she’s very young, the man is mature – go back to the hotel and find out the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and mortality and youth intersects with dance of death chaos. It’s an unnerving reflection about longing and deterioration, two bodies aging together as spouses, the attachment and aggression and gentleness in matrimony.

Not merely the scariest, but likely a top example of brief tales out there, and an individual preference. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to be released in this country several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I read this book by a pool overseas in 2020. Although it was sunny I experienced cold creep over me. Additionally, I sensed the excitement of fascination. I was working on a new project, and I had hit a wall. I wasn’t sure if it was possible an effective approach to compose certain terrifying elements the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I saw that there was a way.

Published in 1995, the story is a bleak exploration through the mind of a murderer, Quentin P, based on a notorious figure, the serial killer who slaughtered and cut apart 17 young men and boys in the Midwest over a decade. Infamously, this person was consumed with creating a submissive individual who would never leave him and carried out several macabre trials to achieve this.

The actions the story tells are appalling, but equally frightening is its own mental realism. The character’s dreadful, shattered existence is simply narrated in spare prose, details omitted. The audience is immersed caught in his thoughts, forced to observe ideas and deeds that horrify. The alien nature of his psyche resembles a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Going into Zombie feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from a gifted writer

During my youth, I sleepwalked and eventually began having night terrors. Once, the fear featured a nightmare in which I was stuck within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I found that I had removed a part off the window, attempting to escape. That house was crumbling; during heavy rain the ground floor corridor filled with water, maggots came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

When a friend presented me with the story, I had moved out with my parents, but the narrative of the house high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to me, longing at that time. It’s a book about a haunted loud, atmospheric home and a young woman who consumes limestone from the cliffs. I adored the story immensely and came back frequently to its pages, always finding {something