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A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I discovered this story long ago and it has stayed with me since then. The so-called “summer people” turn out to be a couple from New York, who rent the same off-grid country cottage every summer. This time, instead of heading back to urban life, they opt to prolong their stay an extra month – a decision that to disturb all the locals in the surrounding community. Each repeats the same veiled caution that nobody has ever stayed at the lake beyond Labor Day. Even so, the Allisons are determined to not leave, and at that point events begin to get increasingly weird. The person who supplies oil won’t sell for them. Nobody is willing to supply food to the cottage, and as the Allisons attempt to go to the village, their vehicle fails to start. Bad weather approaches, the batteries of their radio diminish, and as darkness falls, “the two old people clung to each other in their summer cottage and expected”. What might be they expecting? What might the residents know? Every time I revisit Jackson’s disturbing and influential story, I’m reminded that the finest fright originates in the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative two people travel to a typical coastal village where church bells toll the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is irritating and inexplicable. The opening very scary episode happens after dark, at the time they choose to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the water. Sand is present, there is the odor of decaying seafood and brine, there are waves, but the sea appears spectral, or something else and more dreadful. It is simply profoundly ominous and each occasion I visit to a beach in the evening I remember this narrative that ruined the ocean after dark for me – in a good way.

The newlyweds – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – return to the hotel and discover the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, necro-orgy and death-and-the-maiden encounters dance of death bedlam. It is a disturbing reflection on desire and deterioration, two people maturing in tandem as spouses, the bond and brutality and gentleness of marriage.

Not merely the most terrifying, but likely among the finest brief tales available, and a beloved choice. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of Aickman stories to be published locally several years back.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into Zombie beside the swimming area in the French countryside in 2020. Although it was sunny I experienced an icy feeling over me. I also felt the excitement of excitement. I was composing my latest book, and I encountered a block. I didn’t know whether there existed an effective approach to compose certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I saw that there was a way.

Published in 1995, the novel is a grim journey through the mind of a murderer, Quentin P, based on a notorious figure, the serial killer who murdered and mutilated 17 young men and boys in a city between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, this person was consumed with producing a submissive individual who would never leave by his side and attempted numerous grisly attempts to achieve this.

The deeds the story tells are terrible, but similarly terrifying is its psychological persuasiveness. The character’s awful, shattered existence is plainly told in spare prose, details omitted. The audience is immersed stuck in his mind, forced to see ideas and deeds that appal. The foreignness of his mind feels like a tangible impact – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Going into this book is less like reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced experiencing nightmares. Once, the horror involved a nightmare during which I was confined within an enclosure and, as I roused, I realized that I had ripped a piece from the window, trying to get out. That house was crumbling; during heavy rain the downstairs hall flooded, insect eggs fell from the ceiling onto the bed, and on one occasion a large rat climbed the drapes in the bedroom.

Once a companion gave me the story, I was no longer living at my family home, but the tale regarding the building located on the coastline appeared known to myself, nostalgic at that time. It’s a novel featuring a possessed clamorous, sentimental building and a young woman who eats chalk from the shoreline. I adored the novel deeply and returned frequently to its pages, always finding {something