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A Renowned Horror Author

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I read this tale years ago and it has lingered with me since then. The so-called “summer people” are a couple from New York, who lease an identical remote country cottage each year. This time, instead of heading back home, they choose to extend their stay a few more weeks – a decision that to unsettle everyone in the surrounding community. Each repeats the same veiled caution that no one has remained by the water past Labor Day. Regardless, the couple are resolved to remain, and that is the moment things start to become stranger. The person who delivers fuel won’t sell for them. No one will deliver groceries to the cottage, and as the Allisons attempt to drive into town, their vehicle fails to start. A storm gathers, the power in the radio die, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple clung to each other in their summer cottage and expected”. What are the Allisons expecting? What might the locals be aware of? Whenever I peruse Jackson’s unnerving and thought-provoking story, I recall that the finest fright stems from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a couple go to a common coastal village where church bells toll continuously, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and unexplainable. The first very scary scene happens after dark, at the time they decide to take a walk and they fail to see the sea. Sand is present, there is the odor of decaying seafood and seawater, waves crash, but the ocean seems phantom, or another thing and more dreadful. It is truly deeply malevolent and whenever I go to the shore after dark I think about this story that destroyed the ocean after dark to my mind – in a good way.

The recent spouses – she’s very young, the husband is older – go back to the hotel and discover the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden meets danse macabre chaos. It’s an unnerving meditation on desire and deterioration, two bodies aging together as spouses, the connection and violence and gentleness of marriage.

Not merely the most frightening, but probably one of the best concise narratives in existence, and a personal favourite. I experienced it en español, in the first edition of Aickman stories to be released in this country in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I delved into this narrative near the water in the French countryside in 2020. Although it was sunny I experienced cold creep within me. Additionally, I sensed the electricity of excitement. I was working on a new project, and I faced a block. I was uncertain if there was any good way to write various frightening aspects the book contains. Going through this book, I understood that there was a way.

Released decades ago, the book is a bleak exploration through the mind of a young serial killer, the main character, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who murdered and dismembered numerous individuals in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, the killer was fixated with making a submissive individual that would remain by his side and made many grisly attempts to do so.

The acts the story tells are appalling, but just as scary is its psychological persuasiveness. The character’s terrible, broken reality is directly described using minimal words, names redacted. You is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, compelled to see thoughts and actions that appal. The alien nature of his thinking feels like a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Starting Zombie feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching from a gifted writer

When I was a child, I sleepwalked and later started experiencing nightmares. Once, the horror included a vision during which I was stuck within an enclosure and, as I roused, I discovered that I had removed a part from the window, attempting to escape. That building was decaying; when it rained heavily the entranceway flooded, fly larvae dropped from above into the bedroom, and at one time a large rat ascended the window coverings in the bedroom.

When a friend presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out at my family home, but the narrative about the home located on the coastline felt familiar to me, homesick as I was. It is a story about a haunted clamorous, atmospheric home and a young woman who ingests limestone from the shoreline. I adored the book so much and returned again and again to its pages, each time discovering {something