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A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I discovered this tale long ago and it has haunted me ever since. The titular vacationers are a couple urban dwellers, who rent an identical remote country cottage every summer. During this visit, in place of returning home, they decide to extend their stay an extra month – a decision that to alarm all the locals in the adjacent village. Each repeats an identical cryptic advice that nobody has remained by the water past Labor Day. Even so, the couple are determined to stay, and that’s when situations commence to get increasingly weird. The person who brings oil declines to provide to them. Nobody is willing to supply food to their home, and as they endeavor to go to the village, the car won’t start. A tempest builds, the energy of their radio die, and as darkness falls, “the two old people crowded closely within their rental and waited”. What could be this couple waiting for? What might the residents know? Every time I read the writer’s unnerving and influential story, I’m reminded that the finest fright stems from what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a couple go to a common seaside town where church bells toll constantly, a constant chiming that is annoying and puzzling. The first truly frightening moment takes place during the evening, when they opt to take a walk and they are unable to locate the sea. Sand is present, there’s the smell of rotting fish and brine, there are waves, but the sea appears spectral, or a different entity and more dreadful. It is simply deeply malevolent and whenever I travel to the coast in the evening I think about this story which spoiled the ocean after dark to my mind – favorably.

The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – return to their lodging and discover the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, necro-orgy and mortality and youth encounters dance of death chaos. It is a disturbing contemplation about longing and deterioration, a pair of individuals maturing in tandem as partners, the bond and aggression and gentleness of marriage.

Not only the most frightening, but probably one of the best brief tales available, and a beloved choice. I encountered it en español, in the first edition of Aickman stories to appear in this country in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I read Zombie by a pool in France in 2020. Despite the sunshine I experienced cold creep within me. I also felt the excitement of fascination. I was composing a new project, and I had hit a block. I wasn’t sure whether there existed an effective approach to compose various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Experiencing this novel, I saw that it could be done.

Published in 1995, the story is a grim journey into the thoughts of a young serial killer, Quentin P, modeled after a notorious figure, the criminal who slaughtered and dismembered numerous individuals in the Midwest during a specific period. Notoriously, this person was consumed with producing a zombie sex slave that would remain by his side and carried out several grisly attempts to do so.

The acts the novel describes are horrific, but equally frightening is its emotional authenticity. Quentin P’s dreadful, fragmented world is simply narrated using minimal words, names redacted. The audience is sunk deep stuck in his mind, forced to witness thoughts and actions that appal. The foreignness of his mind feels like a physical shock – or being stranded in an empty realm. Starting this book is less like reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and subsequently commenced having night terrors. At one point, the fear involved a dream during which I was stuck inside a container and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had removed a piece out of the window frame, trying to get out. That house was crumbling; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall became inundated, fly larvae came down from the roof onto the bed, and at one time a large rat climbed the drapes in that space.

After an acquaintance handed me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere at my family home, but the tale about the home perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable in my view, homesick at that time. It’s a novel about a haunted loud, sentimental building and a female character who consumes limestone from the cliffs. I adored the book so much and came back frequently to the story, always finding {something