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A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I discovered this story some time back and it has stayed with me since then. The titular “summer people” turn out to be a couple from the city, who rent the same remote lakeside house annually. During this visit, rather than going back to urban life, they decide to extend their stay an extra month – an action that appears to disturb all the locals in the adjacent village. Each repeats the same veiled caution that not a soul has remained in the area past the holiday. Regardless, the couple insist to stay, and that’s when situations commence to get increasingly weird. The individual who delivers the kerosene won’t sell to them. Not a single person agrees to bring supplies to the cabin, and as they attempt to go to the village, their vehicle fails to start. A tempest builds, the power in the radio diminish, and as darkness falls, “the two old people clung to each other in their summer cottage and expected”. What are the Allisons waiting for? What could the townspeople be aware of? Every time I revisit the writer’s unnerving and influential narrative, I’m reminded that the best horror originates in that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative two people travel to an ordinary beach community where church bells toll constantly, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and unexplainable. The initial very scary episode occurs during the evening, when they opt to walk around and they can’t find the ocean. Sand is present, there’s the smell of rotting fish and seawater, surf is audible, but the water seems phantom, or something else and worse. It is truly insanely sinister and every time I go to the shore in the evening I think about this narrative which spoiled the sea at night in my view – favorably.

The recent spouses – she’s very young, the man is mature – head back to the inn and learn why the bells ring, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and demise and innocence encounters danse macabre bedlam. It is a disturbing reflection on desire and deterioration, two bodies aging together as a couple, the connection and violence and tenderness of marriage.

Not merely the most frightening, but perhaps one of the best brief tales in existence, and a personal favourite. I encountered it en español, in the debut release of this author’s works to be published locally a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this book near the water overseas in 2020. Despite the sunshine I experienced cold creep within me. I also experienced the thrill of excitement. I was working on my third novel, and I faced a wall. I wasn’t sure if it was possible any good way to write various frightening aspects the book contains. Experiencing this novel, I saw that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the story is a dark flight within the psyche of a murderer, the main character, inspired by an infamous individual, the serial killer who murdered and cut apart 17 young men and boys in a city over a decade. As is well-known, this person was obsessed with producing a zombie sex slave that would remain him and made many grisly attempts to accomplish it.

The actions the novel describes are appalling, but just as scary is its own mental realism. The protagonist’s terrible, shattered existence is plainly told in spare prose, names redacted. You is immersed stuck in his mind, forced to see ideas and deeds that horrify. The strangeness of his psyche is like a physical shock – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Starting Zombie feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I sleepwalked and later started having night terrors. Once, the terror featured a vision during which I was trapped inside a container and, as I roused, I discovered that I had torn off the slat from the window, seeking to leave. That building was falling apart; when storms came the entranceway became inundated, fly larvae came down from the roof into the bedroom, and at one time a big rodent climbed the drapes in that space.

After an acquaintance presented me with the story, I was no longer living at my family home, but the tale of the house perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable to myself, homesick at that time. It is a book about a haunted loud, emotional house and a young woman who consumes calcium off the rocks. I cherished the novel so much and came back repeatedly to the story, each time discovering {something