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A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I read this narrative some time back and it has stayed with me from that moment. The titular “summer people” are a family from New York, who lease an identical off-grid rural cabin annually. This time, instead of heading back to urban life, they decide to lengthen their holiday a few more weeks – something that seems to disturb all the locals in the nearby town. Everyone conveys the same veiled caution that no one has lingered in the area beyond the end of summer. Even so, the Allisons are resolved to remain, and that’s when events begin to become stranger. The person who brings fuel won’t sell to them. No one will deliver supplies to the cottage, and as the family attempt to drive into town, their vehicle refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the batteries of their radio die, and when night comes, “the two old people clung to each other within their rental and waited”. What could be this couple waiting for? What might the locals know? Whenever I revisit the writer’s disturbing and inspiring narrative, I recall that the top terror originates in that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a couple travel to an ordinary seaside town in which chimes sound constantly, a perpetual pealing that is irritating and puzzling. The first truly frightening episode happens during the evening, at the time they choose to walk around and they are unable to locate the water. Sand is present, there’s the smell of rotting fish and brine, waves crash, but the ocean seems phantom, or another thing and more dreadful. It is simply profoundly ominous and whenever I go to the shore after dark I recall this story that ruined the sea at night for me – in a good way.

The young couple – she’s very young, the husband is older – return to the hotel and find out why the bells ring, in a long sequence of confinement, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth meets grim ballet pandemonium. It’s a chilling contemplation on desire and decay, two bodies growing old jointly as partners, the attachment and brutality and tenderness within wedlock.

Not only the most frightening, but perhaps one of the best brief tales out there, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in Spanish, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to appear locally in 2011.

Catriona Ward

Zombie from an esteemed writer

I read this narrative near the water in France a few years ago. Despite the sunshine I felt a chill through me. Additionally, I sensed the excitement of anticipation. I was working on my third novel, and I had hit an obstacle. I didn’t know if it was possible a proper method to compose some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Going through this book, I saw that it was possible.

Published in 1995, the story is a bleak exploration into the thoughts of a criminal, Quentin P, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who murdered and mutilated multiple victims in a city between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, this person was fixated with creating a compliant victim who would stay with him and made many horrific efforts to achieve this.

The acts the novel describes are appalling, but equally frightening is the mental realism. Quentin P’s awful, shattered existence is plainly told using minimal words, details omitted. The reader is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, obliged to observe thoughts and actions that shock. The alien nature of his mind feels like a tangible impact – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Entering this story feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

During my youth, I walked in my sleep and subsequently commenced experiencing nightmares. Once, the terror featured a nightmare during which I was stuck in a box and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had ripped a part off the window, trying to get out. That house was decaying; when storms came the ground floor corridor became inundated, maggots fell from the ceiling onto the bed, and at one time a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

Once a companion presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out with my parents, but the story about the home high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to myself, nostalgic as I felt. This is a book featuring a possessed noisy, atmospheric home and a female character who consumes chalk from the shoreline. I adored the story immensely and returned again and again to its pages, always finding {something