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A Renowned Horror Author

A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense

I read this narrative long ago and it has stayed with me ever since. The named “summer people” are the Allisons from New York, who occupy the same off-grid lakeside house every summer. This time, rather than going back to urban life, they decide to extend their holiday for a month longer – something that seems to alarm everyone in the adjacent village. All pass on the same veiled caution that not a soul has remained at the lake past the end of summer. Nonetheless, the couple are determined to remain, and that is the moment situations commence to get increasingly weird. The person who brings the kerosene refuses to sell to them. No one will deliver food to the cabin, and at the time the Allisons try to travel to the community, their vehicle refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the power in the radio diminish, and when night comes, “the two old people clung to each other in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What could be they anticipating? What could the residents be aware of? Whenever I peruse this author’s disturbing and inspiring tale, I’m reminded that the best horror originates in that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by a noted author

In this concise narrative a pair go to a common coastal village where bells ring continuously, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and puzzling. The opening very scary scene takes place after dark, when they opt to take a walk and they fail to see the water. Sand is present, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and brine, waves crash, but the sea seems phantom, or something else and worse. It’s just insanely sinister and every time I go to the coast in the evening I recall this story that ruined the sea at night for me – in a good way.

The young couple – she’s very young, the man is mature – return to their lodging and discover the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth encounters danse macabre chaos. It’s a chilling meditation regarding craving and decay, two people growing old jointly as partners, the attachment and aggression and affection in matrimony.

Not only the most frightening, but probably a top example of brief tales available, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in Spanish, in the first edition of Aickman stories to be released locally a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into Zombie near the water in France recently. Even with the bright weather I sensed an icy feeling through me. I also felt the excitement of anticipation. I was writing a new project, and I encountered an obstacle. I didn’t know whether there existed an effective approach to compose some of the fearful things the book contains. Going through this book, I saw that it was possible.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a dark flight within the psyche of a young serial killer, the protagonist, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who killed and cut apart multiple victims in the Midwest over a decade. Infamously, the killer was obsessed with producing a compliant victim that would remain with him and carried out several macabre trials to accomplish it.

The acts the novel describes are appalling, but just as scary is the emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s dreadful, shattered existence is directly described in spare prose, names redacted. You is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, compelled to observe mental processes and behaviors that appal. The strangeness of his psyche is like a tangible impact – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Entering this story is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

In my early years, I sleepwalked and later started having night terrors. Once, the fear included a dream during which I was confined within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I realized that I had removed a part off the window, attempting to escape. That building was crumbling; when it rained heavily the ground floor corridor became inundated, fly larvae came down from the roof onto the bed, and on one occasion a big rodent climbed the drapes in that space.

When a friend gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out at my family home, but the story regarding the building perched on the cliffs appeared known to myself, homesick as I was. This is a story about a haunted loud, sentimental building and a female character who consumes calcium off the rocks. I adored the novel immensely and came back repeatedly to it, each time discovering {something