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A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I encountered this tale years ago and it has haunted me from that moment. The so-called vacationers are the Allisons from the city, who rent an identical isolated rural cabin each year. On this occasion, rather than heading back home, they choose to lengthen their stay an extra month – something that seems to alarm all the locals in the nearby town. Everyone conveys the same veiled caution that not a soul has ever stayed at the lake beyond the end of summer. Regardless, they are determined to stay, and that’s when events begin to get increasingly weird. The man who supplies oil declines to provide for them. Not a single person is willing to supply supplies to the cottage, and at the time the family endeavor to go to the village, their vehicle fails to start. A tempest builds, the energy within the device diminish, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple clung to each other inside their cabin and anticipated”. What are this couple anticipating? What do the residents understand? Every time I peruse the writer’s chilling and influential story, I recall that the best horror originates in what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a pair travel to a typical coastal village where church bells toll continuously, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and inexplicable. The opening very scary scene occurs at night, at the time they choose to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the sea. There’s sand, there is the odor of rotting fish and seawater, waves crash, but the water is a ghost, or a different entity and even more alarming. It’s just deeply malevolent and whenever I visit to a beach after dark I recall this story which spoiled the sea at night to my mind – in a good way.

The recent spouses – she’s very young, the man is mature – head back to their lodging and find out why the bells ring, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and demise and innocence encounters danse macabre pandemonium. It’s an unnerving reflection on desire and decline, two bodies growing old jointly as spouses, the bond and brutality and gentleness in matrimony.

Not merely the most frightening, but probably a top example of brief tales in existence, and a personal favourite. I read it en español, in the first edition of this author’s works to appear in this country in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I read this narrative beside the swimming area overseas in 2020. Even with the bright weather I felt a chill within me. I also felt the excitement of fascination. I was working on my latest book, and I faced an obstacle. I didn’t know whether there existed an effective approach to compose various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Going through this book, I realized that it was possible.

Published in 1995, the story is a grim journey through the mind of a murderer, the protagonist, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who killed and mutilated multiple victims in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, the killer was consumed with making a submissive individual who would stay by his side and carried out several grisly attempts to achieve this.

The acts the story tells are appalling, but just as scary is its emotional authenticity. Quentin P’s dreadful, fragmented world is simply narrated using minimal words, names redacted. The reader is immersed trapped in his consciousness, obliged to see ideas and deeds that horrify. The strangeness of his thinking feels like a physical shock – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Going into Zombie is less like reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching from a gifted writer

In my early years, I was a somnambulist and later started suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the horror featured a nightmare during which I was trapped in a box and, as I roused, I found that I had ripped a piece from the window, attempting to escape. That house was decaying; when storms came the entranceway became inundated, insect eggs fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and at one time a large rat climbed the drapes in that space.

When a friend presented me with the story, I had moved out with my parents, but the tale about the home perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable in my view, homesick as I felt. This is a book concerning a ghostly loud, atmospheric home and a female character who eats calcium from the cliffs. I adored the story so much and went back repeatedly to its pages, each time discovering {something