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A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I encountered this narrative long ago and it has stayed with me from that moment. The so-called seasonal visitors happen to be a couple from New York, who lease a particular off-grid rural cabin annually. On this occasion, instead of heading back to the city, they choose to lengthen their stay for a month longer – an action that appears to unsettle everyone in the surrounding community. Each repeats the same veiled caution that nobody has remained in the area after the end of summer. Even so, they are resolved to remain, and at that point events begin to become stranger. The person who supplies the kerosene declines to provide for them. Not a single person will deliver food to their home, and at the time they attempt to travel to the community, the automobile refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the power within the device die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple crowded closely in their summer cottage and waited”. What are the Allisons anticipating? What do the locals understand? Each occasion I read the writer’s disturbing and thought-provoking narrative, I recall that the best horror originates in that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this short story a pair go to a common coastal village where bells ring continuously, a perpetual pealing that is annoying and inexplicable. The opening truly frightening moment occurs at night, when they opt to walk around and they are unable to locate the sea. The beach is there, there is the odor of decaying seafood and salt, surf is audible, but the water seems phantom, or another thing and even more alarming. It is truly deeply malevolent and whenever I go to the coast in the evening I remember this narrative that ruined the beach in the evening to my mind – favorably.

The young couple – she’s very young, he’s not – head back to their lodging and learn the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and demise and innocence encounters danse macabre bedlam. It’s an unnerving reflection regarding craving and decay, a pair of individuals aging together as spouses, the bond and aggression and gentleness of marriage.

Not just the scariest, but probably a top example of brief tales available, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in Spanish, in the first edition of this author’s works to be published in Argentina in 2011.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this narrative near the water in the French countryside in 2020. Even with the bright weather I sensed cold creep over me. I also experienced the excitement of fascination. I was working on my latest book, and I encountered a block. I was uncertain if it was possible an effective approach to craft certain terrifying elements the book contains. Going through this book, I understood that there was a way.

Released decades ago, the story is a grim journey within the psyche of a young serial killer, the main character, modeled after a notorious figure, the serial killer who killed and cut apart multiple victims in a city over a decade. As is well-known, the killer was consumed with producing a compliant victim who would never leave by his side and carried out several macabre trials to do so.

The deeds the novel describes are terrible, but similarly terrifying is its mental realism. Quentin P’s awful, broken reality is plainly told with concise language, identities hidden. The audience is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, compelled to see ideas and deeds that horrify. The alien nature of his mind resembles a bodily jolt – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Going into this story is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from a gifted writer

In my early years, I was a somnambulist and later started experiencing nightmares. At one point, the fear involved a nightmare in which I was trapped inside a container and, upon awakening, I realized that I had removed a part from the window, attempting to escape. That building was falling apart; during heavy rain the downstairs hall filled with water, fly larvae fell from the ceiling onto the bed, and once a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in that space.

After an acquaintance presented me with this author’s book, I was no longer living at my family home, but the story about the home high on the Dover cliffs appeared known to me, longing as I was. It’s a novel featuring a possessed loud, sentimental building and a female character who consumes calcium from the cliffs. I adored the story deeply and went back again and again to its pages, consistently uncovering {something