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A Renowned Horror Author

A Chilling Tale by a master of suspense

I read this story long ago and it has stayed with me ever since. The named “summer people” happen to be a couple from New York, who lease the same off-grid lakeside house each year. On this occasion, rather than returning home, they decide to extend their holiday an extra month – an action that appears to alarm each resident in the nearby town. Each repeats a similar vague warning that nobody has ever stayed in the area past Labor Day. Nonetheless, they are resolved to not leave, and that’s when events begin to get increasingly weird. The individual who delivers fuel refuses to sell for them. No one agrees to bring groceries to the cabin, and as they attempt to go to the village, their vehicle refuses to operate. A storm gathers, the power in the radio die, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple huddled together within their rental and expected”. What might be this couple expecting? What could the townspeople understand? Each occasion I peruse the writer’s disturbing and influential tale, I recall that the finest fright stems from what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a couple go to a typical beach community where bells ring constantly, a constant chiming that is annoying and inexplicable. The first truly frightening moment takes place after dark, at the time they opt to take a walk and they are unable to locate the sea. There’s sand, there is the odor of rotting fish and brine, there are waves, but the sea is a ghost, or another thing and even more alarming. It’s just insanely sinister and whenever I go to a beach in the evening I think about this narrative that destroyed the ocean after dark to my mind – in a good way.

The newlyweds – she’s very young, he’s not – go back to their lodging and learn why the bells ring, during a prolonged scene of confinement, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden meets grim ballet chaos. It’s a chilling meditation regarding craving and deterioration, a pair of individuals aging together as spouses, the attachment and violence and affection of marriage.

Not only the scariest, but probably one of the best concise narratives in existence, and an individual preference. I encountered it in Spanish, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to be released in this country several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I read this narrative beside the swimming area in the French countryside recently. Even with the bright weather I felt an icy feeling through me. I also experienced the electricity of fascination. I was composing my latest book, and I encountered a block. I didn’t know whether there existed a proper method to compose some of the fearful things the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I realized that it could be done.

Released decades ago, the novel is a grim journey into the thoughts of a young serial killer, Quentin P, based on an infamous individual, the criminal who killed and dismembered multiple victims in the Midwest during a specific period. Notoriously, Dahmer was consumed with producing a submissive individual who would never leave with him and carried out several macabre trials to achieve this.

The deeds the story tells are horrific, but similarly terrifying is the psychological persuasiveness. The protagonist’s terrible, broken reality is simply narrated in spare prose, identities hidden. The reader is plunged caught in his thoughts, obliged to observe thoughts and actions that appal. The alien nature of his psyche feels like a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Starting this story feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I walked in my sleep and later started having night terrors. Once, the horror included a vision during which I was confined in a box and, when I woke up, I found that I had removed a piece out of the window frame, trying to get out. That home was decaying; when it rained heavily the ground floor corridor filled with water, fly larvae fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and on one occasion a big rodent scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

When a friend handed me this author’s book, I had moved out in my childhood residence, but the story regarding the building perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable in my view, nostalgic as I was. It’s a story concerning a ghostly loud, emotional house and a young woman who ingests chalk from the cliffs. I cherished the book immensely and went back frequently to its pages, each time discovering {something