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A Renowned Horror Author

A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson

I discovered this story years ago and it has haunted me since then. The so-called “summer people” turn out to be the Allisons urban dwellers, who rent the same isolated country cottage annually. During this visit, in place of heading back to urban life, they decide to prolong their vacation an extra month – a decision that to unsettle everyone in the surrounding community. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that not a soul has lingered at the lake beyond the holiday. Nonetheless, they are resolved to stay, and that’s when events begin to grow more bizarre. The person who supplies the kerosene declines to provide to the couple. Nobody is willing to supply food to the cottage, and as the Allisons endeavor to go to the village, the car fails to start. A tempest builds, the energy within the device fade, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple clung to each other in their summer cottage and waited”. What are the Allisons anticipating? What could the residents be aware of? Every time I revisit the writer’s unnerving and thought-provoking story, I’m reminded that the best horror stems from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by a noted author

In this brief tale a couple journey to a typical coastal village where church bells toll constantly, an incessant ringing that is annoying and puzzling. The opening truly frightening moment happens during the evening, as they opt to walk around and they can’t find the water. The beach is there, the scent exists of decaying seafood and seawater, surf is audible, but the sea seems phantom, or something else and more dreadful. It is truly deeply malevolent and whenever I travel to the coast at night I remember this tale that destroyed the ocean after dark for me – favorably.

The newlyweds – the wife is youthful, he’s not – go back to the hotel and learn the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and death-and-the-maiden encounters grim ballet chaos. It is a disturbing meditation on desire and decline, two people maturing in tandem as spouses, the bond and brutality and gentleness of marriage.

Not just the most frightening, but perhaps one of the best concise narratives out there, and a personal favourite. I encountered it en español, in the first edition of this author’s works to be released in Argentina in 2011.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I read this book beside the swimming area in the French countryside recently. Although it was sunny I sensed an icy feeling through me. I also experienced the thrill of fascination. I was working on a new project, and I had hit a block. I wasn’t sure if it was possible any good way to write certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I saw that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a bleak exploration into the thoughts of a murderer, the main character, modeled after a notorious figure, the murderer who murdered and mutilated 17 young men and boys in the Midwest over a decade. Infamously, the killer was fixated with creating a submissive individual who would stay with him and attempted numerous horrific efforts to do so.

The deeds the book depicts are appalling, but just as scary is its psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s terrible, broken reality is directly described with concise language, names redacted. You is plunged trapped in his consciousness, compelled to witness mental processes and behaviors that shock. The alien nature of his thinking is like a tangible impact – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Going into Zombie is less like reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and later started having night terrors. Once, the horror involved a nightmare where I was trapped in a box and, when I woke up, I found that I had removed a part off the window, attempting to escape. That house was falling apart; when storms came the ground floor corridor flooded, maggots came down from the roof into the bedroom, and once a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

After an acquaintance gave me this author’s book, I was no longer living at my family home, but the story of the house high on the Dover cliffs appeared known to me, homesick at that time. This is a book featuring a possessed loud, atmospheric home and a female character who consumes chalk off the rocks. I cherished the story deeply and returned frequently to its pages, always finding {something