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A Renowned Horror Author

A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson

I read this narrative years ago and it has haunted me from that moment. The titular seasonal visitors turn out to be a couple urban dwellers, who lease the same remote lakeside house annually. On this occasion, in place of heading back to the city, they opt to extend their holiday for a month longer – an action that appears to disturb each resident in the nearby town. All pass on a similar vague warning that no one has ever stayed at the lake after the holiday. Regardless, the Allisons are resolved to not leave, and that’s when events begin to get increasingly weird. The man who delivers fuel declines to provide for them. Not a single person agrees to bring groceries to the cabin, and when the family try to go to the village, their vehicle won’t start. A storm gathers, the power within the device die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people huddled together within their rental and expected”. What might be this couple waiting for? What could the residents know? Whenever I read Jackson’s disturbing and inspiring tale, I’m reminded that the best horror stems from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this short story a couple journey to a typical coastal village where bells ring the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and inexplicable. The initial truly frightening scene occurs after dark, as they choose to walk around and they fail to see the sea. The beach is there, the scent exists of putrid marine life and seawater, there are waves, but the water seems phantom, or another thing and even more alarming. It is truly insanely sinister and every time I go to the shore after dark I think about this narrative which spoiled the ocean after dark for me – favorably.

The newlyweds – she’s very young, the man is mature – return to the hotel and discover why the bells ring, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and demise and innocence meets danse macabre bedlam. It’s an unnerving reflection on desire and decline, two bodies growing old jointly as a couple, the attachment and violence and tenderness in matrimony.

Not only the scariest, but likely among the finest short stories available, and a beloved choice. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of this author’s works to appear in Argentina a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer

I delved into this narrative near the water overseas recently. Even with the bright weather I experienced an icy feeling within me. I also felt the excitement of fascination. I was working on my third novel, and I had hit a block. I wasn’t sure whether there existed an effective approach to write some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I realized that it could be done.

Published in 1995, the book is a bleak exploration into the thoughts of a criminal, Quentin P, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who slaughtered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in a city over a decade. Notoriously, this person was obsessed with producing a zombie sex slave who would stay by his side and attempted numerous grisly attempts to accomplish it.

The acts the novel describes are appalling, but just as scary is the emotional authenticity. The character’s terrible, fragmented world is plainly told with concise language, names redacted. You is plunged trapped in his consciousness, compelled to see thoughts and actions that horrify. The strangeness of his thinking feels like a physical shock – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Starting Zombie feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by a gifted writer

In my early years, I sleepwalked and later started suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the terror featured a nightmare in which I was trapped inside a container and, upon awakening, I realized that I had torn off a piece from the window, seeking to leave. That building was crumbling; when it rained heavily the entranceway became inundated, maggots fell from the ceiling on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a sizeable vermin climbed the drapes in that space.

Once a companion gave me this author’s book, I was no longer living with my parents, but the tale regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs appeared known in my view, nostalgic as I was. It is a novel featuring a possessed loud, emotional house and a young woman who ingests chalk from the shoreline. I adored the novel deeply and came back repeatedly to its pages, always finding {something