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A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I encountered this tale years ago and it has haunted me from that moment. The named vacationers turn out to be a family from the city, who lease a particular off-grid lakeside house annually. This time, rather than returning home, they choose to prolong their holiday a few more weeks – something that seems to alarm all the locals in the nearby town. All pass on a similar vague warning that nobody has lingered by the water after the end of summer. Even so, they insist to not leave, and at that point things start to get increasingly weird. The individual who brings oil declines to provide for them. No one agrees to bring groceries to the cottage, and at the time the family try to drive into town, their vehicle fails to start. A tempest builds, the power within the device diminish, and when night comes, “the two old people clung to each other within their rental and waited”. What could be the Allisons anticipating? What could the locals understand? Every time I revisit the writer’s disturbing and inspiring tale, I recall that the best horror comes from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this short story two people go to an ordinary beach community where church bells toll the whole time, a constant chiming that is bothersome and unexplainable. The first extremely terrifying scene happens at night, at the time they choose to go for a stroll and they fail to see the sea. The beach is there, there is the odor of rotting fish and seawater, waves crash, but the water is a ghost, or something else and even more alarming. It’s just insanely sinister and each occasion I travel to the shore in the evening I think about this tale which spoiled the ocean after dark for me – favorably.

The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, he’s not – go back to the hotel and find out the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and demise and innocence meets grim ballet pandemonium. It’s a chilling meditation on desire and deterioration, a pair of individuals maturing in tandem as spouses, the connection and brutality and gentleness in matrimony.

Not just the scariest, but likely one of the best concise narratives out there, and a beloved choice. I read it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of these tales to be published in this country a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I perused this book by a pool overseas recently. Despite the sunshine I sensed a chill through me. I also experienced the electricity of excitement. I was working on a new project, and I encountered a block. I didn’t know if there was a proper method to craft some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Going through this book, I realized that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a grim journey through the mind of a murderer, Quentin P, based on a notorious figure, the serial killer who slaughtered and mutilated 17 young men and boys in a city between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, Dahmer was fixated with producing a submissive individual who would never leave by his side and made many horrific efforts to achieve this.

The deeds the novel describes are horrific, but equally frightening is its mental realism. The protagonist’s terrible, shattered existence is plainly told using minimal words, names redacted. You is plunged trapped in his consciousness, forced to witness ideas and deeds that horrify. The alien nature of his mind is like a tangible impact – or being stranded in an empty realm. Starting this story feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from a gifted writer

When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and subsequently commenced experiencing nightmares. At one point, the horror featured a vision where I was confined inside a container and, when I woke up, I found that I had removed the slat off the window, seeking to leave. That house was falling apart; when it rained heavily the ground floor corridor became inundated, maggots fell from the ceiling onto the bed, and on one occasion a large rat climbed the drapes in the bedroom.

After an acquaintance handed me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere at my family home, but the story of the house high on the Dover cliffs appeared known to myself, homesick at that time. This is a story concerning a ghostly clamorous, emotional house and a female character who ingests chalk off the rocks. I adored the story immensely and returned repeatedly to its pages, always finding {something