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A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I discovered this tale long ago and it has lingered with me since then. The named vacationers turn out to be a couple urban dwellers, who lease an identical remote lakeside house every summer. During this visit, in place of heading back home, they choose to prolong their stay an extra month – a decision that to alarm each resident in the nearby town. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that no one has lingered at the lake after the holiday. Nonetheless, the Allisons are resolved to not leave, and that is the moment events begin to get increasingly weird. The individual who delivers oil declines to provide to them. Not a single person will deliver groceries to the cottage, and as the Allisons try to go to the village, the automobile refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the batteries of their radio fade, and when night comes, “the elderly couple clung to each other within their rental and waited”. What are the Allisons waiting for? What do the residents understand? Every time I peruse the writer’s unnerving and thought-provoking narrative, I remember that the finest fright stems from that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by a noted author

In this brief tale a couple journey to a typical beach community where church bells toll the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is annoying and unexplainable. The initial extremely terrifying episode takes place during the evening, as they decide to take a walk and they fail to see the sea. There’s sand, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and salt, surf is audible, but the sea seems phantom, or a different entity and more dreadful. It’s just profoundly ominous and whenever I visit to the shore after dark I think about this tale that ruined the ocean after dark for me – positively.

The newlyweds – she’s very young, he’s not – go back to the hotel and learn why the bells ring, during a prolonged scene of confinement, necro-orgy and death-and-the-maiden intersects with grim ballet chaos. It’s a chilling reflection regarding craving and decay, two bodies maturing in tandem as a couple, the bond and brutality and tenderness in matrimony.

Not only the most terrifying, but probably one of the best short stories available, and a beloved choice. I read it en español, in the debut release of these tales to be released in this country a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this book by a pool in France in 2020. Despite the sunshine I experienced cold creep over me. I also felt the electricity of fascination. I was composing my latest book, and I encountered a block. I was uncertain whether there existed a proper method to write some of the fearful things the book contains. Going through this book, I saw that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a grim journey through the mind of a murderer, the protagonist, inspired by a notorious figure, the criminal who murdered and dismembered multiple victims in a city over a decade. Infamously, the killer was obsessed with creating a compliant victim who would never leave with him and carried out several macabre trials to achieve this.

The deeds the story tells are appalling, but just as scary is the mental realism. The character’s dreadful, broken reality is directly described in spare prose, details omitted. The audience is plunged trapped in his consciousness, obliged to see mental processes and behaviors that shock. The alien nature of his thinking feels like a tangible impact – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Going into this book feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and subsequently commenced having night terrors. Once, the horror included a nightmare during which I was confined inside a container and, upon awakening, I found that I had torn off a piece from the window, seeking to leave. That home was falling apart; during heavy rain the entranceway filled with water, insect eggs came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and at one time a sizeable vermin climbed the drapes in the bedroom.

When a friend presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the tale regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs appeared known to me, nostalgic as I was. It is a novel about a haunted noisy, atmospheric home and a young woman who ingests limestone from the cliffs. I cherished the novel immensely and returned again and again to its pages, always finding {something