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A Renowned Horror Author

A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson

I read this tale long ago and it has haunted me ever since. The named seasonal visitors turn out to be a family urban dwellers, who occupy an identical remote rural cabin annually. On this occasion, instead of returning to urban life, they choose to prolong their stay for a month longer – something that seems to disturb all the locals in the adjacent village. Each repeats the same veiled caution that no one has ever stayed by the water beyond the end of summer. Nonetheless, they insist to not leave, and that’s when situations commence to get increasingly weird. The individual who supplies oil won’t sell for them. Not a single person agrees to bring food to their home, and as they attempt to drive into town, their vehicle fails to start. Bad weather approaches, the power in the radio fade, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals crowded closely in their summer cottage and waited”. What could be this couple waiting for? What do the locals understand? Every time I read the writer’s disturbing and inspiring tale, I recall that the best horror comes from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a couple journey to a typical seaside town where bells ring continuously, a constant chiming that is annoying and unexplainable. The first very scary moment takes place after dark, when they decide to take a walk and they can’t find the sea. There’s sand, there is the odor of rotting fish and brine, surf is audible, but the ocean seems phantom, or something else and more dreadful. It is simply deeply malevolent and every time I visit to the shore at night I recall this tale which spoiled the beach in the evening in my view – favorably.

The recent spouses – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – head back to the hotel and discover why the bells ring, through an extended episode of confinement, necro-orgy and mortality and youth intersects with grim ballet chaos. It’s an unnerving reflection on desire and deterioration, two bodies maturing in tandem as partners, the bond and violence and affection within wedlock.

Not just the scariest, but likely one of the best concise narratives available, and a personal favourite. I experienced it en español, in the first edition of Aickman stories to appear locally several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this book near the water overseas a few years ago. Despite the sunshine I experienced a chill over me. Additionally, I sensed the electricity of anticipation. I was composing my third novel, and I encountered a wall. I didn’t know if it was possible any good way to craft certain terrifying elements the book contains. Experiencing this novel, I understood that it could be done.

Released decades ago, the book is a dark flight through the mind of a murderer, Quentin P, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who killed and cut apart numerous individuals in a city during a specific period. Notoriously, this person was consumed with producing a submissive individual that would remain with him and attempted numerous grisly attempts to accomplish it.

The acts the story tells are appalling, but just as scary is the psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s terrible, broken reality is plainly told with concise language, details omitted. You is plunged stuck in his mind, obliged to observe thoughts and actions that shock. The alien nature of his thinking is like a physical shock – or getting lost on a desolate planet. Going into this story is less like reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by a gifted writer

During my youth, I sleepwalked and eventually began experiencing nightmares. At one point, the horror involved a nightmare during which I was trapped inside a container and, upon awakening, I realized that I had torn off a piece from the window, attempting to escape. That house was falling apart; during heavy rain the downstairs hall filled with water, fly larvae fell from the ceiling on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a large rat ascended the window coverings in that space.

When a friend gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living in my childhood residence, but the story about the home perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable to myself, homesick at that time. It is a novel about a haunted loud, sentimental building and a female character who consumes limestone from the cliffs. I loved the story deeply and came back again and again to its pages, each time discovering {something