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A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I read this tale long ago and it has stayed with me since then. The so-called seasonal visitors happen to be a couple urban dwellers, who occupy an identical isolated rural cabin every summer. During this visit, instead of heading back home, they decide to lengthen their holiday a few more weeks – something that seems to unsettle each resident in the nearby town. Each repeats a similar vague warning that not a soul has remained in the area beyond Labor Day. Even so, the couple insist to not leave, and that’s when events begin to grow more bizarre. The man who delivers the kerosene won’t sell to them. Not a single person will deliver supplies to the cabin, and at the time the family try to go to the village, the car fails to start. A storm gathers, the batteries in the radio fade, and as darkness falls, “the two old people huddled together inside their cabin and waited”. What might be the Allisons anticipating? What might the townspeople know? Whenever I peruse the writer’s chilling and thought-provoking story, I recall that the finest fright comes from what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by a noted author

In this short story two people journey to an ordinary seaside town where church bells toll constantly, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and unexplainable. The opening truly frightening episode happens during the evening, at the time they decide to walk around and they are unable to locate the ocean. Sand is present, there’s the smell of rotting fish and seawater, surf is audible, but the ocean is a ghost, or another thing and more dreadful. It is simply deeply malevolent and whenever I travel to the shore in the evening I think about this story that destroyed the beach in the evening to my mind – favorably.

The newlyweds – the woman is adolescent, the husband is older – return to the inn and learn why the bells ring, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden intersects with dance of death chaos. It’s an unnerving contemplation regarding craving and deterioration, two bodies aging together as spouses, the attachment and brutality and gentleness within wedlock.

Not just the most terrifying, but perhaps among the finest concise narratives available, and a personal favourite. I read it in Spanish, in the debut release of Aickman stories to be published locally a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I perused Zombie beside the swimming area in France recently. Despite the sunshine I experienced a chill over me. Additionally, I sensed the thrill of anticipation. I was composing my latest book, and I faced an obstacle. I wasn’t sure if it was possible a proper method to compose some of the fearful things the book contains. Experiencing this novel, I understood that there was a way.

Released decades ago, the book is a bleak exploration within the psyche of a young serial killer, the main character, based on a notorious figure, the serial killer who killed and mutilated numerous individuals in the Midwest during a specific period. As is well-known, the killer was consumed with making a compliant victim that would remain him and carried out several grisly attempts to achieve this.

The actions the book depicts are terrible, but just as scary is its mental realism. The protagonist’s awful, shattered existence is simply narrated in spare prose, names redacted. The reader is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, obliged to witness mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The foreignness of his mind resembles a physical shock – or getting lost in an empty realm. Starting Zombie is less like reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I sleepwalked and later started suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the horror featured a nightmare in which I was trapped inside a container and, when I woke up, I realized that I had ripped the slat out of the window frame, attempting to escape. That house was crumbling; when storms came the ground floor corridor flooded, insect eggs fell from the ceiling onto the bed, and once a big rodent ascended the window coverings in that space.

After an acquaintance handed me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out in my childhood residence, but the tale about the home perched on the cliffs appeared known to me, nostalgic as I felt. It is a novel about a haunted clamorous, emotional house and a female character who eats limestone from the shoreline. I adored the story so much and returned frequently to its pages, consistently uncovering {something