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A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People from a master of suspense

I read this narrative years ago and it has haunted me from that moment. The titular “summer people” are a family urban dwellers, who lease the same off-grid lakeside house every summer. This time, in place of going back to urban life, they choose to lengthen their holiday for a month longer – a decision that to unsettle everyone in the surrounding community. Each repeats a similar vague warning that not a soul has ever stayed by the water after Labor Day. Even so, the couple are determined to remain, and that’s when events begin to get increasingly weird. The individual who brings oil won’t sell to them. Nobody will deliver supplies to the cottage, and as the family try to travel to the community, the automobile won’t start. A storm gathers, the power in the radio die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the aged individuals crowded closely in their summer cottage and waited”. What could be this couple expecting? What could the locals understand? Every time I peruse Jackson’s chilling and influential tale, I recall that the best horror comes from what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a pair go to an ordinary beach community where church bells toll constantly, an incessant ringing that is annoying and puzzling. The opening truly frightening episode happens after dark, as they opt to take a walk and they fail to see the water. Sand is present, the scent exists of putrid marine life and brine, there are waves, but the water seems phantom, or a different entity and even more alarming. It is truly profoundly ominous and whenever I go to the coast in the evening I recall this tale that ruined the beach in the evening to my mind – in a good way.

The recent spouses – the wife is youthful, he’s not – go back to the hotel and discover the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth intersects with danse macabre chaos. It’s an unnerving meditation on desire and decline, two people growing old jointly as spouses, the bond and violence and tenderness of marriage.

Not merely the most frightening, but probably among the finest brief tales in existence, and an individual preference. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of Aickman stories to be released in this country several years back.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates

I read this book beside the swimming area overseas a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I sensed an icy feeling through me. I also felt the thrill of anticipation. I was writing my third novel, and I had hit a block. I wasn’t sure if there was an effective approach to write some of the fearful things the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I saw that there was a way.

Published in 1995, the book is a bleak exploration into the thoughts of a young serial killer, the protagonist, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who killed and mutilated numerous individuals in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, the killer was obsessed with producing a zombie sex slave who would never leave with him and carried out several macabre trials to accomplish it.

The actions the book depicts are terrible, but equally frightening is its own emotional authenticity. Quentin P’s dreadful, shattered existence is directly described with concise language, identities hidden. The audience is immersed caught in his thoughts, forced to observe thoughts and actions that shock. The foreignness of his psyche resembles a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Starting Zombie is not just reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching from a gifted writer

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and later started experiencing nightmares. At one point, the terror involved a nightmare where I was stuck inside a container and, upon awakening, I found that I had torn off a piece out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That building was crumbling; when it rained heavily the entranceway flooded, fly larvae fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and once a large rat climbed the drapes in that space.

Once a companion gave me the story, I was no longer living in my childhood residence, but the narrative of the house perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable in my view, longing as I was. It is a novel featuring a possessed clamorous, emotional house and a young woman who eats chalk from the shoreline. I loved the story immensely and returned repeatedly to its pages, always finding {something