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A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I read this narrative long ago and it has lingered with me since then. The named seasonal visitors happen to be a family from the city, who lease a particular off-grid country cottage each year. This time, in place of returning to the city, they opt to prolong their holiday an extra month – something that seems to unsettle each resident in the nearby town. All pass on a similar vague warning that no one has lingered by the water past Labor Day. Even so, the couple are resolved to stay, and that is the moment things start to become stranger. The person who brings the kerosene won’t sell to them. Not a single person is willing to supply groceries to their home, and as they try to travel to the community, their vehicle fails to start. Bad weather approaches, the power in the radio die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people huddled together within their rental and expected”. What are they anticipating? What might the residents be aware of? Every time I read Jackson’s chilling and thought-provoking narrative, I remember that the best horror originates in what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by a noted author

In this concise narrative a couple go to a common seaside town where bells ring the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and puzzling. The first truly frightening moment takes place at night, at the time they choose to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the ocean. There’s sand, the scent exists of putrid marine life and seawater, waves crash, but the sea is a ghost, or something else and even more alarming. It is simply insanely sinister and every time I visit to the coast after dark I think about this story which spoiled the ocean after dark for me – favorably.

The young couple – she’s very young, the man is mature – head back to the hotel and discover why the bells ring, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and demise and innocence meets danse macabre pandemonium. It’s a chilling meditation on desire and deterioration, two bodies aging together as partners, the connection and violence and tenderness of marriage.

Not only the most frightening, but probably a top example of brief tales available, and a personal favourite. I read it in Spanish, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to be published in this country several years back.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I perused Zombie by a pool in France in 2020. Despite the sunshine I sensed an icy feeling through me. Additionally, I sensed the excitement of fascination. I was working on a new project, and I faced an obstacle. I didn’t know whether there existed an effective approach to compose various frightening aspects the story includes. Reading Zombie, I understood that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a grim journey within the psyche of a murderer, the main character, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who slaughtered and cut apart 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, the killer was fixated with creating a compliant victim who would never leave by his side and attempted numerous horrific efforts to do so.

The actions the book depicts are appalling, but just as scary is the emotional authenticity. Quentin P’s terrible, fragmented world is simply narrated in spare prose, identities hidden. The reader is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, forced to observe thoughts and actions that horrify. The strangeness of his thinking is like a physical shock – or getting lost on a desolate planet. Going into Zombie feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the terror featured a nightmare in which I was trapped inside a container and, as I roused, I discovered that I had removed a part off the window, seeking to leave. That home was falling apart; when storms came the entranceway filled with water, insect eggs came down from the roof onto the bed, and once a large rat ascended the window coverings in the bedroom.

Once a companion presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living at my family home, but the story of the house perched on the cliffs felt familiar in my view, nostalgic as I was. It is a book featuring a possessed loud, atmospheric home and a young woman who consumes calcium from the cliffs. I adored the story immensely and returned frequently to its pages, always finding {something