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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 seasonal visitors turn out to be a couple from New York, who rent the same off-grid lakeside house each year. This time, rather than heading back home, they choose to prolong their vacation an extra month – something that seems to disturb each resident in the surrounding community. All pass on the same veiled caution that not a soul has ever stayed by the water after Labor Day. Regardless, the couple are determined to remain, and that’s when situations commence to become stranger. The person who brings oil declines to provide for them. Not a single person agrees to bring groceries to the cottage, and at the time they attempt to go to the village, their vehicle won’t start. A tempest builds, the energy within the device fade, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple huddled together in their summer cottage and expected”. What are the Allisons anticipating? What might the townspeople understand? Each occasion I read the writer’s chilling and inspiring tale, I remember that the best horror originates in that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a couple go to a typical seaside town where bells ring continuously, a constant chiming that is irritating and puzzling. The initial extremely terrifying episode takes place after dark, when they choose to walk around and they can’t find the ocean. The beach is there, there is the odor of rotting fish and seawater, waves crash, but the sea appears spectral, or something else and even more alarming. It is truly deeply malevolent and whenever I travel to the shore in the evening I think about this tale that destroyed the sea at night to my mind – positively.

The newlyweds – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – go back to their lodging and find out the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of confinement, gruesome festivities and death-and-the-maiden encounters dance of death chaos. It’s an unnerving reflection about longing and decay, two people aging together as a couple, the connection and aggression and gentleness of marriage.

Not only the scariest, but probably one of the best brief tales in existence, and a beloved choice. I experienced it in Spanish, in the first edition of these tales to be published locally in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this narrative by a pool overseas in 2020. Although it was sunny I experienced cold creep through me. I also experienced the excitement of anticipation. I was writing my latest book, and I faced a wall. I wasn’t sure if there was any good way to craft certain terrifying elements the book contains. Going through this book, I understood that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the book is a bleak exploration through the mind of a young serial killer, Quentin P, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who murdered and dismembered numerous individuals in the Midwest during a specific period. As is well-known, Dahmer was obsessed with producing a zombie sex slave who would stay by his side and made many macabre trials to achieve this.

The deeds the novel describes are appalling, but just as scary is its own emotional authenticity. Quentin P’s awful, broken reality is directly described in spare prose, names redacted. The audience is immersed caught in his thoughts, forced to observe mental processes and behaviors that shock. The alien nature of his mind is like a tangible impact – or getting lost in an empty realm. Starting this story is less like reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I sleepwalked and later started having night terrors. On one occasion, the fear included a nightmare during which I was stuck within an enclosure and, as I roused, I realized that I had torn off the slat out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That building was falling apart; when storms came the ground floor corridor became inundated, maggots dropped from above onto the bed, and on one occasion a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in that space.

After an acquaintance gave me this author’s book, I had moved out in my childhood residence, but the narrative about the home perched on the cliffs felt familiar to me, homesick as I felt. It is a novel featuring a possessed loud, sentimental building and a girl who consumes limestone off the rocks. I adored the book immensely and went back frequently to the story, consistently uncovering {something