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A Renowned Horror Author

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I discovered this narrative some time back and it has haunted me since then. The titular “summer people” turn out to be a family from New York, who rent a particular off-grid lakeside house every summer. During this visit, in place of heading back to the city, they choose to lengthen their vacation for a month longer – an action that appears to unsettle everyone in the surrounding community. Each repeats the same veiled caution that not a soul has lingered in the area past Labor Day. Even so, they are resolved to remain, and that’s when situations commence to get increasingly weird. The man who supplies fuel refuses to sell for them. Nobody will deliver supplies to their home, and when the Allisons attempt to drive into town, the car won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the batteries of their radio die, and when night comes, “the aged individuals huddled together within their rental and anticipated”. What could be they waiting for? What do the locals be aware of? Every time I peruse Jackson’s unnerving and thought-provoking tale, I’m reminded that the best horror comes from what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a pair journey to a typical beach community where church bells toll continuously, a perpetual pealing that is annoying and inexplicable. The opening truly frightening moment takes place after dark, as they decide to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the sea. There’s sand, the scent exists of decaying seafood and brine, surf is audible, but the water is a ghost, or something else and more dreadful. It is simply insanely sinister and whenever I visit to a beach in the evening I remember this story which spoiled the ocean after dark for me – positively.

The newlyweds – the wife is youthful, the husband is older – head back to the hotel and learn the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and demise and innocence intersects with danse macabre chaos. It’s an unnerving meditation regarding craving and decline, a pair of individuals maturing in tandem as a couple, the connection and violence and affection within wedlock.

Not just the most terrifying, but perhaps one of the best concise narratives out there, and a beloved choice. I encountered it en español, in the debut release of this author’s works to be released locally in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this narrative by a pool in the French countryside in 2020. Even with the bright weather I sensed an icy feeling within me. I also experienced the excitement of anticipation. I was composing my latest book, and I faced an obstacle. I was uncertain if there was any good way to craft certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Going through this book, I saw that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a grim journey through the mind of a criminal, the protagonist, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who murdered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in the Midwest over a decade. Infamously, the killer was fixated with making a zombie sex slave who would stay with him and made many horrific efforts to achieve this.

The actions the story tells are appalling, but equally frightening is its psychological persuasiveness. The character’s awful, broken reality is directly described in spare prose, details omitted. The reader is plunged stuck in his mind, compelled to witness ideas and deeds that horrify. The foreignness of his thinking feels like a bodily jolt – or being stranded in an empty realm. Entering this story is less like reading than a full body experience. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

When I was a child, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced having night terrors. At one point, the horror included a vision in which I was confined in a box and, when I woke up, I realized that I had removed a piece off the window, seeking to leave. That home was falling apart; when it rained heavily the entranceway flooded, insect eggs came down from the roof onto the bed, and on one occasion a large rat climbed the drapes in that space.

After an acquaintance presented me with this author’s book, I was no longer living in my childhood residence, but the story about the home perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable to me, nostalgic as I was. This is a book concerning a ghostly noisy, sentimental building and a female character who ingests limestone from the shoreline. I adored the book immensely and came back frequently to the story, consistently uncovering {something