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A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I discovered this story long ago and it has haunted me since then. The titular vacationers turn out to be a couple urban dwellers, who rent a particular remote rural cabin every summer. On this occasion, rather than going back home, they decide to extend their stay for a month longer – an action that appears to unsettle everyone in the nearby town. All pass on an identical cryptic advice that not a soul has remained by the water after the end of summer. Nonetheless, the couple insist to remain, and that is the moment things start to become stranger. The person who brings fuel refuses to sell to the couple. Not a single person will deliver food to the cabin, and as the family attempt to travel to the community, their vehicle won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the power in the radio fade, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple crowded closely in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What could be the Allisons anticipating? What could the townspeople know? Every time I read Jackson’s disturbing and thought-provoking tale, I recall that the top terror stems from that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this short story two people travel to an ordinary beach community where bells ring continuously, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and inexplicable. The initial truly frightening scene occurs at night, when they choose to take a walk and they fail to see the ocean. The beach is there, there’s the smell of rotting fish and brine, waves crash, but the water is a ghost, or a different entity and worse. It is simply deeply malevolent and every time I visit to the coast at night I recall this story which spoiled the sea at night to my mind – in a good way.

The newlyweds – she’s very young, the husband is older – return to their lodging and find out the reason for the chiming, during a prolonged scene of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth encounters danse macabre bedlam. It’s an unnerving contemplation on desire and decay, two bodies growing old jointly as spouses, the connection and violence and affection in matrimony.

Not only the scariest, but perhaps one of the best concise narratives available, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in Spanish, in the debut release of this author’s works to be published locally several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I perused this book near the water in the French countryside in 2020. Although it was sunny I felt cold creep within me. I also felt the thrill of excitement. I was composing a new project, and I had hit a wall. I was uncertain if it was possible an effective approach to craft some of the fearful things the story includes. Reading Zombie, I realized that there was a way.

Released decades ago, the book is a dark flight into the thoughts of a murderer, the protagonist, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who slaughtered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in the Midwest over a decade. Infamously, this person was consumed with creating a zombie sex slave who would never leave him and attempted numerous grisly attempts to do so.

The acts the story tells are terrible, but just as scary is its own psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s awful, shattered existence is directly described using minimal words, details omitted. The reader is sunk deep stuck in his mind, forced to see mental processes and behaviors that appal. The foreignness of his psyche is like a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Entering this story is not just reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I sleepwalked and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the terror involved a dream during which I was trapped within an enclosure and, upon awakening, I realized that I had torn off a part off the window, seeking to leave. That house was crumbling; when it rained heavily the entranceway became inundated, maggots fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and on one occasion a sizeable vermin climbed the drapes in that space.

Once a companion presented me with the story, I had moved out in my childhood residence, but the narrative regarding the building located on the coastline felt familiar in my view, longing at that time. It is a novel concerning a ghostly clamorous, sentimental building and a girl who consumes chalk off the rocks. I cherished the book deeply and went back frequently to its pages, consistently uncovering {something