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A Renowned Horror Author

A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense

I read this narrative long ago and it has stayed with me from that moment. The titular “summer people” turn out to be a family from the city, who lease a particular off-grid country cottage each year. This time, in place of going back to the city, they choose to prolong their vacation a few more weeks – a decision that to alarm each resident in the adjacent village. All pass on a similar vague warning that no one has lingered by the water after the holiday. Nonetheless, the couple are resolved to stay, and that is the moment things start to get increasingly weird. The person who delivers fuel refuses to sell to them. Nobody will deliver supplies to their home, and as they attempt to travel to the community, the automobile fails to start. A storm gathers, the batteries in the radio die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people clung to each other within their rental and expected”. What could be the Allisons anticipating? What might the townspeople be aware of? Every time I revisit this author’s unnerving and inspiring tale, I recall that the top terror stems from what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a couple travel to a common coastal village where bells ring constantly, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and puzzling. The first extremely terrifying scene happens during the evening, at the time they opt to walk around and they can’t find the sea. There’s sand, the scent exists of decaying seafood and salt, waves crash, but the ocean seems phantom, or something else and even more alarming. It’s just deeply malevolent and whenever I visit to a beach after dark I think about this tale that destroyed the sea at night in my view – in a good way.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, he’s not – go back to their lodging and find out why the bells ring, in a long sequence of confinement, macabre revelry and mortality and youth intersects with grim ballet pandemonium. It’s a chilling contemplation regarding craving and decay, two bodies aging together as spouses, the bond and violence and tenderness of marriage.

Not only the scariest, but likely a top example of concise narratives out there, and an individual preference. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of this author’s works to appear in Argentina in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates

I read this narrative beside the swimming area in the French countryside in 2020. Despite the sunshine I experienced a chill over me. I also felt the electricity of fascination. I was working on my latest book, and I faced a wall. I wasn’t sure if it was possible any good way to craft some of the fearful things the story includes. Going through this book, I realized that it could be done.

Published in 1995, the story is a bleak exploration within the psyche of a young serial killer, the main character, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who murdered and mutilated 17 young men and boys in a city over a decade. Notoriously, this person was consumed with making a compliant victim who would never leave him and made many macabre trials to achieve this.

The deeds the novel describes are terrible, but equally frightening is the emotional authenticity. The character’s awful, broken reality is simply narrated with concise language, names redacted. The reader is sunk deep stuck in his mind, forced to see mental processes and behaviors that appal. The strangeness of his mind feels like a bodily jolt – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Entering this story is less like reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I walked in my sleep and later started having night terrors. On one occasion, the horror involved a nightmare in which I was trapped within an enclosure and, upon awakening, I found that I had removed a piece off the window, attempting to escape. That house was decaying; during heavy rain the ground floor corridor filled with water, fly larvae fell from the ceiling on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a big rodent ascended the window coverings in that space.

When a friend presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living with my parents, but the tale about the home located on the coastline appeared known to myself, longing at that time. It’s a book concerning a ghostly loud, atmospheric home and a girl who eats chalk from the cliffs. I adored the novel deeply and went back again and again to it, always finding {something