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A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I read this narrative long ago and it has stayed with me from that moment. The named “summer people” happen to be the Allisons from the city, who rent a particular isolated country cottage annually. This time, instead of heading back home, they choose to extend their stay for a month longer – something that seems to disturb all the locals in the surrounding community. Each repeats a similar vague warning that nobody has lingered by the water past the holiday. Nonetheless, the couple insist to remain, and at that point events begin to get increasingly weird. The person who delivers the kerosene refuses to sell to them. No one agrees to bring groceries to their home, and at the time the Allisons try to drive into town, the automobile fails to start. A storm gathers, the energy of their radio die, and when night comes, “the two old people clung to each other within their rental and expected”. What are this couple expecting? What might the locals understand? Whenever I peruse the writer’s disturbing and inspiring tale, I remember that the finest fright comes from that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman

In this short story a pair go to a typical coastal village where church bells toll continuously, a perpetual pealing that is irritating and inexplicable. The opening truly frightening scene happens after dark, when they choose to walk around and they can’t find the water. There’s sand, there is the odor of rotting fish and seawater, waves crash, but the ocean appears spectral, or another thing and even more alarming. It’s just deeply malevolent and whenever I go to the shore after dark I recall this story that destroyed the sea at night to my mind – positively.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – return to the inn and learn the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and mortality and youth encounters danse macabre bedlam. It’s a chilling contemplation on desire and deterioration, two bodies maturing in tandem as partners, the connection and violence and affection within wedlock.

Not just the most frightening, but perhaps among the finest concise narratives out there, and an individual preference. I encountered it in Spanish, in the first edition of this author’s works to be released locally in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer

I delved into this narrative by a pool in the French countryside in 2020. Even with the bright weather I sensed an icy feeling over me. I also felt the thrill of anticipation. I was working on my third novel, and I encountered a wall. I wasn’t sure if it was possible an effective approach to craft some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Experiencing this novel, I realized that there was a way.

Released decades ago, the story is a dark flight within the psyche of a young serial killer, the protagonist, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who killed and cut apart 17 young men and boys in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, Dahmer was consumed with making a zombie sex slave who would stay by his side and made many macabre trials to achieve this.

The deeds the novel describes are appalling, but equally frightening is its own psychological persuasiveness. The character’s terrible, fragmented world is simply narrated using minimal words, identities hidden. The audience is immersed stuck in his mind, forced to see thoughts and actions that appal. The alien nature of his psyche is like a tangible impact – or finding oneself isolated on a desolate planet. Going into this story is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and subsequently commenced experiencing nightmares. At one point, the fear featured a vision during which I was trapped in a box and, upon awakening, I realized that I had ripped a piece off the window, trying to get out. That home was falling apart; when it rained heavily the ground floor corridor flooded, fly larvae dropped from above onto the bed, and on one occasion a sizeable vermin climbed the drapes in the bedroom.

Once a companion presented me with the story, I had moved out in my childhood residence, but the story about the home located on the coastline felt familiar to me, longing at that time. It is a novel about a haunted noisy, atmospheric home and a young woman who eats chalk off the rocks. I adored the story so much and returned frequently to its pages, always finding {something