🔗 Share this article

A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People by a master of suspense

I read this story years ago and it has haunted me since then. The named seasonal visitors happen to be a family from New York, who occupy a particular isolated rural cabin annually. This time, rather than heading back to the city, they choose to prolong their holiday an extra month – a decision that to unsettle each resident in the adjacent village. All pass on a similar vague warning that no one has ever stayed in the area beyond the holiday. Regardless, they insist to stay, and that is the moment events begin to become stranger. The person who brings fuel won’t sell to them. Not a single person will deliver food to their home, and when they endeavor to drive into town, the car fails to start. A storm gathers, the energy of their radio diminish, and when night comes, “the two old people huddled together inside their cabin and expected”. What are the Allisons expecting? What might the residents know? Each occasion I peruse Jackson’s disturbing and inspiring narrative, I recall that the best horror originates in what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this short story a pair travel to an ordinary coastal village where church bells toll constantly, an incessant ringing that is irritating and inexplicable. The initial extremely terrifying moment occurs at night, at the time they decide to walk around and they fail to see the water. There’s sand, the scent exists of putrid marine life and seawater, waves crash, but the water seems phantom, or a different entity and even more alarming. It is truly profoundly ominous and whenever I go to a beach in the evening I think about this narrative which spoiled the sea at night in my view – favorably.

The newlyweds – the wife is youthful, the husband is older – head back to the inn and discover the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, necro-orgy and mortality and youth encounters dance of death bedlam. It’s an unnerving reflection regarding craving and deterioration, two people aging together as a couple, the attachment and brutality and gentleness in matrimony.

Not merely the most frightening, but probably a top example of concise narratives out there, and a beloved choice. I read it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of these tales to appear locally several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this book by a pool in France recently. Even with the bright weather I sensed an icy feeling through me. I also felt the excitement of anticipation. I was writing my latest book, and I had hit a wall. I wasn’t sure if there was an effective approach to craft certain terrifying elements the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I realized that there was a way.

Published in 1995, the book is a grim journey into the thoughts of a murderer, the main character, based on an infamous individual, the criminal who killed and mutilated multiple victims in the Midwest during a specific period. Notoriously, Dahmer was fixated with producing a zombie sex slave who would stay with him and carried out several macabre trials to achieve this.

The acts the story tells are horrific, but equally frightening is its own mental realism. The protagonist’s dreadful, fragmented world is directly described using minimal words, identities hidden. The reader is sunk deep stuck in his mind, forced to witness ideas and deeds that shock. The foreignness of his psyche resembles a tangible impact – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Going into Zombie is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from a gifted writer

During my youth, I walked in my sleep and subsequently commenced suffering from bad dreams. Once, the horror involved a dream during which I was trapped in a box and, when I woke up, I realized that I had torn off a piece off the window, seeking to leave. That home was crumbling; when it rained heavily the ground floor corridor became inundated, insect eggs came down from the roof into the bedroom, and at one time a big rodent ascended the window coverings in the bedroom.

After an acquaintance presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living with my parents, but the tale regarding the building perched on the cliffs appeared known to me, longing as I was. This is a book concerning a ghostly loud, atmospheric home and a female character who consumes chalk from the shoreline. I cherished the novel deeply and returned repeatedly to it, consistently uncovering {something