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A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People from a master of suspense

I discovered this narrative some time back and it has stayed with me ever since. The titular “summer people” turn out to be the Allisons urban dwellers, who rent a particular isolated rural cabin every summer. This time, instead of heading back home, they decide to prolong their holiday for a month longer – an action that appears to unsettle everyone in the surrounding community. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that not a soul has ever stayed at the lake past Labor Day. Even so, they insist to not leave, and that is the moment events begin to grow more bizarre. The man who delivers the kerosene won’t sell to the couple. Nobody is willing to supply food to the cabin, and as the Allisons try to go to the village, the car refuses to operate. A storm gathers, the batteries of their radio die, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals crowded closely inside their cabin and expected”. What might be they waiting for? What might the townspeople be aware of? Every time I peruse this author’s disturbing and inspiring story, I’m reminded that the best horror originates in what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman

In this short story two people travel to a common coastal village where bells ring the whole time, a constant chiming that is annoying and inexplicable. The initial extremely terrifying scene occurs at night, at the time they choose to walk around and they are unable to locate the sea. The beach is there, the scent exists of rotting fish and seawater, there are waves, but the ocean seems phantom, or a different entity and worse. It is truly profoundly ominous and whenever I go to the shore after dark I remember this narrative that destroyed the beach in the evening for me – favorably.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – go back to the hotel and learn the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of confinement, macabre revelry and mortality and youth intersects with danse macabre pandemonium. It is a disturbing reflection on desire and decay, two bodies maturing in tandem as spouses, the attachment and violence and affection in matrimony.

Not merely the most frightening, but likely a top example of short stories available, and a beloved choice. I experienced it en español, in the first edition of Aickman stories to be published in Argentina several years back.

Catriona Ward

Zombie from an esteemed writer

I read this narrative beside the swimming area in France recently. Although it was sunny I felt a chill over me. Additionally, I sensed the thrill of anticipation. I was writing my third novel, and I faced an obstacle. I was uncertain whether there existed an effective approach to write some of the fearful things the book contains. Reading Zombie, I realized that there was a way.

Published in 1995, the novel is a dark flight into the thoughts of a young serial killer, the protagonist, based on an infamous individual, the serial killer who killed and dismembered numerous individuals in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, Dahmer was consumed with making a submissive individual who would stay by his side and carried out several grisly attempts to achieve this.

The actions the novel describes are terrible, but similarly terrifying is its own emotional authenticity. Quentin P’s terrible, shattered existence is directly described with concise language, identities hidden. The reader is sunk deep stuck in his mind, compelled to observe thoughts and actions that shock. The strangeness of his thinking is like a physical shock – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Entering Zombie feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. Once, the horror featured a vision in which I was confined inside a container and, upon awakening, I realized that I had removed a part off the window, trying to get out. That house was decaying; during heavy rain the ground floor corridor filled with water, fly larvae dropped from above into the bedroom, and on one occasion a large rat ascended the window coverings in that space.

When a friend gave me the story, I was residing elsewhere at my family home, but the narrative about the home located on the coastline seemed recognizable to me, nostalgic at that time. It’s a book concerning a ghostly noisy, emotional house and a girl who ingests calcium off the rocks. I cherished the story immensely and returned frequently to its pages, each time discovering {something