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A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People by a master of suspense

I encountered this story some time back and it has stayed with me since then. The named seasonal visitors are the Allisons from New York, who rent the same remote lakeside house each year. During this visit, in place of returning to the city, they decide to prolong their stay for a month longer – something that seems to unsettle all the locals in the adjacent village. Each repeats a similar vague warning that not a soul has lingered in the area past Labor Day. Nonetheless, the Allisons are determined to stay, and that’s when things start to become stranger. The man who supplies fuel refuses to sell to the couple. Not a single person is willing to supply food to their home, and when the Allisons try to drive into town, their vehicle won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the energy within the device die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people crowded closely within their rental and waited”. What might be this couple expecting? What could the locals know? Each occasion I revisit this author’s chilling and influential narrative, I recall that the finest fright originates in the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a couple travel to a typical seaside town in which chimes sound the whole time, a constant chiming that is bothersome and inexplicable. The first truly frightening moment happens after dark, when they opt to take a walk and they are unable to locate the ocean. The beach is there, there is the odor of putrid marine life and brine, there are waves, but the ocean is a ghost, or something else and worse. It is truly deeply malevolent and each occasion I go to the shore after dark I recall this narrative which spoiled the sea at night for me – favorably.

The newlyweds – the wife is youthful, the husband is older – head back to their lodging and discover the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and mortality and youth intersects with danse macabre chaos. It is a disturbing reflection on desire and decline, a pair of individuals aging together as a couple, the connection and aggression and tenderness of marriage.

Not merely the scariest, but probably one of the best concise narratives out there, and an individual preference. I read it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of this author’s works to appear in Argentina in 2011.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this book near the water in the French countryside in 2020. Although it was sunny I sensed a chill through me. Additionally, I sensed the excitement of excitement. I was working on my third novel, and I encountered a wall. I didn’t know if it was possible a proper method to craft certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Going through this book, I saw that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the story is a grim journey within the psyche of a criminal, Quentin P, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who slaughtered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in a city between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, Dahmer was fixated with making a zombie sex slave who would never leave with him and carried out several grisly attempts to achieve this.

The actions the story tells are terrible, but equally frightening is its own psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s dreadful, broken reality is directly described using minimal words, details omitted. You is immersed caught in his thoughts, compelled to observe mental processes and behaviors that shock. The alien nature of his mind feels like a physical shock – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Going into this story feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I sleepwalked and later started having night terrors. At one point, the horror involved a nightmare during which I was confined within an enclosure and, upon awakening, I realized that I had removed a part from the window, seeking to leave. That building was falling apart; when storms came the ground floor corridor became inundated, insect eggs came down from the roof into the bedroom, and at one time a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in the bedroom.

After an acquaintance gave me the story, I was residing elsewhere at my family home, but the story regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs appeared known to myself, longing at that time. It is a book featuring a possessed clamorous, emotional house and a young woman who ingests limestone from the cliffs. I loved the novel immensely and returned repeatedly to it, each time discovering {something