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A Renowned Horror Author

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I read this narrative long ago and it has stayed with me ever since. The titular seasonal visitors happen to be a family from the city, who rent a particular remote rural cabin every summer. During this visit, instead of going back home, they opt to lengthen their holiday for a month longer – an action that appears to alarm each resident in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that nobody has lingered by the water after the end of summer. Nonetheless, they are determined to remain, and that’s when things start to get increasingly weird. The man who delivers fuel declines to provide to them. Nobody agrees to bring food to the cottage, and as the family attempt to drive into town, the automobile won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the batteries in the radio diminish, and when night comes, “the two old people huddled together in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What are this couple expecting? What could the locals know? Each occasion I peruse Jackson’s disturbing and thought-provoking narrative, I’m reminded that the finest fright originates in that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman

In this short story a pair travel to an ordinary coastal village where church bells toll continuously, a constant chiming that is bothersome and puzzling. The opening very scary moment occurs at night, at the time they choose to take a walk and they fail to see the water. Sand is present, there is the odor of putrid marine life and brine, surf is audible, but the water seems phantom, or another thing and even more alarming. It is truly profoundly ominous and whenever I go to a beach in the evening I think about this narrative that destroyed the ocean after dark in my view – favorably.

The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, he’s not – go back to the hotel and discover the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and demise and innocence meets grim ballet chaos. It’s a chilling reflection on desire and decay, a pair of individuals maturing in tandem as a couple, the bond and violence and gentleness in matrimony.

Not only the most frightening, but perhaps one of the best brief tales available, and an individual preference. I experienced it in Spanish, in the debut release of this author’s works to appear in Argentina several years back.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer

I perused this narrative by a pool in the French countryside recently. Although it was sunny I experienced an icy feeling through me. I also felt the electricity of anticipation. I was working on a new project, and I faced a block. I wasn’t sure whether there existed an effective approach to compose various frightening aspects the book contains. Going through this book, I realized that there was a way.

Released decades ago, the story is a bleak exploration into the thoughts of a young serial killer, Quentin P, modeled after an infamous individual, the murderer who slaughtered and mutilated multiple victims in the Midwest during a specific period. Infamously, the killer was obsessed with making a compliant victim who would stay with him and made many grisly attempts to accomplish it.

The deeds the novel describes are appalling, but just as scary is its mental realism. Quentin P’s terrible, fragmented world is plainly told with concise language, names redacted. The audience is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, compelled to see ideas and deeds that horrify. The alien nature of his mind feels like a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Starting this story feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I sleepwalked and later started having night terrors. Once, the terror involved a vision in which I was stuck within an enclosure and, upon awakening, I discovered that I had torn off the slat out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That house was falling apart; during heavy rain the ground floor corridor flooded, maggots fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and once a large rat climbed the drapes in that space.

Once a companion gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere at my family home, but the tale about the home perched on the cliffs felt familiar to myself, longing at that time. It is a book featuring a possessed clamorous, atmospheric home and a young woman who ingests limestone from the shoreline. I loved the novel so much and returned frequently to it, each time discovering {something