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A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People from a master of suspense

I read this story some time back and it has haunted me from that moment. The titular seasonal visitors are a couple urban dwellers, who lease an identical remote lakeside house each year. During this visit, instead of returning home, they opt to lengthen their holiday an extra month – something that seems to unsettle everyone in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that nobody has lingered by the water past the end of summer. Regardless, the couple insist to remain, and at that point events begin to get increasingly weird. The person who delivers oil won’t sell to the couple. Not a single person will deliver food to the cottage, and at the time they endeavor to drive into town, the automobile won’t start. A tempest builds, the batteries within the device fade, and with the arrival of dusk, “the aged individuals crowded closely inside their cabin and expected”. What could be they waiting for? What do the locals know? Each occasion I peruse Jackson’s disturbing and inspiring narrative, I remember that the best horror originates in the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this short story a couple journey to a typical seaside town where bells ring continuously, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and unexplainable. The first very scary scene occurs after dark, when they decide to walk around and they can’t find the sea. The beach is there, there’s the smell of rotting fish and seawater, there are waves, but the sea is a ghost, or something else and worse. It is truly deeply malevolent and each occasion I travel to the coast after dark I remember this tale that ruined the ocean after dark in my view – in a good way.

The newlyweds – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – go back to their lodging and discover why the bells ring, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and mortality and youth meets dance of death pandemonium. It’s a chilling meditation about longing and decay, two bodies growing old jointly as partners, the connection and aggression and gentleness within wedlock.

Not just the most terrifying, but likely a top example of brief tales in existence, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of this author’s works to be published in Argentina a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I delved into Zombie by a pool overseas in 2020. Although it was sunny I experienced cold creep through me. I also felt the electricity of anticipation. I was writing my latest book, and I had hit a wall. I wasn’t sure if it was possible any good way to craft various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Experiencing this novel, I realized that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the book is a dark flight within the psyche of a murderer, Quentin P, based on a notorious figure, the murderer who killed and dismembered 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee during a specific period. Notoriously, Dahmer was consumed with creating a submissive individual that would remain him and carried out several grisly attempts to accomplish it.

The deeds the story tells are horrific, but equally frightening is its mental realism. The protagonist’s terrible, shattered existence is simply narrated in spare prose, details omitted. The reader is plunged trapped in his consciousness, compelled to witness ideas and deeds that appal. The foreignness of his thinking is like a bodily jolt – or getting lost on a desolate planet. Going into this story feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from a gifted writer

When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and later started suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the terror featured a nightmare in which I was trapped in a box and, as I roused, I realized that I had removed a piece from the window, attempting to escape. That building was crumbling; when storms came the downstairs hall flooded, fly larvae fell from the ceiling onto the bed, and at one time a large rat ascended the window coverings in the bedroom.

Once a companion gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out with my parents, but the narrative of the house high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to me, homesick at that time. It is a novel about a haunted clamorous, emotional house and a young woman who eats limestone from the shoreline. I loved the book so much and went back frequently to it, each time discovering {something