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A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I encountered this narrative years ago and it has haunted me from that moment. The so-called vacationers turn out to be a couple from the city, who occupy an identical off-grid country cottage each year. During this visit, instead of going back to urban life, they decide to lengthen their holiday an extra month – something that seems to unsettle each resident in the surrounding community. Each repeats the same veiled caution that not a soul has lingered in the area past the end of summer. Regardless, the Allisons are determined to stay, and that is the moment things start to become stranger. The individual who delivers fuel refuses to sell to the couple. Not a single person will deliver food to their home, and at the time the family attempt to drive into town, the car won’t start. A tempest builds, the power within the device die, and when night comes, “the two old people crowded closely in their summer cottage and waited”. What could be the Allisons expecting? What could the residents be aware of? Each occasion I read the writer’s disturbing and thought-provoking tale, I recall that the best horror comes from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a couple journey to an ordinary coastal village where bells ring continuously, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and puzzling. The first extremely terrifying scene happens after dark, at the time they choose to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the sea. Sand is present, the scent exists of rotting fish and salt, waves crash, but the sea is a ghost, or another thing and even more alarming. It is simply profoundly ominous and every time I visit to a beach after dark I remember this tale which spoiled the sea at night for me – favorably.

The recent spouses – she’s very young, he’s not – return to the inn and find out why the bells ring, in a long sequence of confinement, necro-orgy and death-and-the-maiden meets dance of death bedlam. It is a disturbing contemplation about longing and decay, two people maturing in tandem as a couple, the bond and brutality and gentleness in matrimony.

Not merely the scariest, but perhaps among the finest concise narratives out there, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in Spanish, in the initial publication of these tales to be released locally a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this narrative beside the swimming area overseas a few years ago. Although it was sunny I felt an icy feeling through me. I also experienced the electricity of fascination. I was composing a new project, and I faced an obstacle. I was uncertain if there was a proper method to craft some of the fearful things the book contains. Going through this book, I realized that it was possible.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a dark flight within the psyche of a murderer, the main character, modeled after a notorious figure, the criminal who killed and dismembered multiple victims in the Midwest over a decade. As is well-known, this person was obsessed with producing a zombie sex slave who would never leave by his side and attempted numerous macabre trials to achieve this.

The deeds the novel describes are horrific, but just as scary is the mental realism. The character’s awful, shattered existence is directly described in spare prose, identities hidden. The audience is immersed trapped in his consciousness, compelled to witness mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The strangeness of his psyche resembles a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated on a desolate planet. Going into this story feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I was a somnambulist and subsequently commenced having night terrors. Once, the horror involved a nightmare during which I was stuck within an enclosure and, upon awakening, I realized that I had torn off a piece from the window, attempting to escape. That building was crumbling; when it rained heavily the ground floor corridor filled with water, insect eggs fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and on one occasion a big rodent scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

When a friend gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the narrative of the house high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to myself, nostalgic at that time. This is a novel concerning a ghostly noisy, sentimental building and a girl who eats chalk from the shoreline. I loved the novel deeply and came back again and again to it, always finding {something