🔗 Share this article

A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People from a master of suspense

I read this story long ago and it has lingered with me ever since. The named “summer people” are a couple from New York, who lease a particular remote lakeside house each year. On this occasion, rather than heading back to urban life, they decide to lengthen their stay a few more weeks – a decision that to disturb each resident in the adjacent village. All pass on an identical cryptic advice that nobody has remained in the area beyond the end of summer. Regardless, the couple insist to remain, and that is the moment things start to grow more bizarre. The individual who supplies oil declines to provide to the couple. Not a single person is willing to supply groceries to the cottage, and at the time they try to travel to the community, the automobile fails to start. A storm gathers, the batteries within the device diminish, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple crowded closely within their rental and anticipated”. What are they expecting? What might the locals understand? Whenever I revisit this author’s unnerving and influential story, I recall that the best horror comes from that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a pair travel to a common beach community where church bells toll constantly, a perpetual pealing that is annoying and unexplainable. The initial extremely terrifying episode takes place during the evening, as they decide to go for a stroll and they fail to see the water. Sand is present, there is the odor of putrid marine life and salt, waves crash, but the sea seems phantom, or something else and even more alarming. It is truly deeply malevolent and every time I go to the shore after dark I think about this tale that ruined the sea at night for me – favorably.

The newlyweds – she’s very young, the man is mature – go back to the inn and discover the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of confinement, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth encounters grim ballet chaos. It’s a chilling reflection about longing and decline, a pair of individuals growing old jointly as partners, the attachment and brutality and gentleness in matrimony.

Not only the scariest, but perhaps one of the best short stories out there, and an individual preference. I experienced it in Spanish, in the first edition of these tales to appear in this country in 2011.

Catriona Ward

Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates

I perused Zombie by a pool in France a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I sensed cold creep over me. I also experienced the electricity of fascination. I was working on my latest book, and I encountered a block. I wasn’t sure whether there existed a proper method to write certain terrifying elements the book contains. Reading Zombie, I realized that there was a way.

Published in 1995, the book is a bleak exploration through the mind of a murderer, the main character, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who killed and cut apart 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, Dahmer was consumed with making a compliant victim who would stay by his side and carried out several macabre trials to achieve this.

The acts the novel describes are terrible, but equally frightening is the emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s terrible, shattered existence is plainly told using minimal words, identities hidden. The reader is plunged stuck in his mind, obliged to see ideas and deeds that shock. The foreignness of his thinking resembles a tangible impact – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Going into Zombie is not just reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

In my early years, I sleepwalked and later started experiencing nightmares. At one point, the terror included a nightmare in which I was trapped within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I found that I had removed a piece out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That building was decaying; when storms came the downstairs hall filled with water, insect eggs came down from the roof onto the bed, and once a sizeable vermin climbed the drapes in that space.

When a friend presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere at my family home, but the tale regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs appeared known to me, longing at that time. It is a book concerning a ghostly loud, sentimental building and a young woman who ingests chalk from the cliffs. I loved the novel so much and came back frequently to it, each time discovering {something