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A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I discovered this narrative some time back and it has stayed with me ever since. The so-called vacationers turn out to be a family from the city, who lease a particular isolated lakeside house every summer. During this visit, instead of going back to the city, they decide to lengthen their stay for a month longer – a decision that to alarm everyone in the adjacent village. Each repeats an identical cryptic advice that not a soul has lingered in the area past the holiday. Nonetheless, they are resolved to remain, and at that point events begin to become stranger. The man who brings fuel refuses to sell to the couple. Not a single person agrees to bring groceries to the cabin, and as they endeavor to travel to the community, the car refuses to operate. A storm gathers, the power within the device die, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple clung to each other within their rental and waited”. What are the Allisons waiting for? What could the townspeople know? Every time I read this author’s unnerving and thought-provoking tale, I’m reminded that the top terror originates in what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this brief tale two people journey to a typical seaside town in which chimes sound constantly, a perpetual pealing that is annoying and unexplainable. The first truly frightening episode occurs during the evening, as they opt to walk around and they can’t find the water. The beach is there, the scent exists of rotting fish and salt, there are waves, but the sea is a ghost, or another thing and more dreadful. It’s just profoundly ominous and whenever I go to the shore in the evening I think about this story which spoiled the sea at night for me – in a good way.

The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – return to the inn and find out why the bells ring, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth meets dance of death pandemonium. It is a disturbing contemplation about longing and decay, two bodies aging together as partners, the connection and violence and gentleness of marriage.

Not merely the scariest, but probably among the finest concise narratives out there, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of Aickman stories to be published locally several years back.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I perused this narrative near the water overseas a few years ago. Despite the sunshine I felt cold creep over me. Additionally, I sensed the thrill of excitement. I was working on a new project, and I faced a wall. I was uncertain whether there existed any good way to craft some of the fearful things the book contains. Reading Zombie, I saw that it was possible.

Published in 1995, the story is a bleak exploration within the psyche of a young serial killer, Quentin P, based on a notorious figure, the criminal who slaughtered and cut apart 17 young men and boys in the Midwest over a decade. Infamously, the killer was obsessed with producing a submissive individual that would remain him and made many horrific efforts to accomplish it.

The acts the book depicts are appalling, but similarly terrifying is the psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s awful, fragmented world is directly described in spare prose, details omitted. The audience is plunged stuck in his mind, obliged to see ideas and deeds that shock. The strangeness of his thinking is like a bodily jolt – or getting lost on a desolate planet. Starting Zombie is not just reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I sleepwalked and later started having night terrors. Once, the fear involved a vision during which I was stuck within an enclosure and, upon awakening, I realized that I had removed a piece out of the window frame, trying to get out. That home was crumbling; when it rained heavily the ground floor corridor filled with water, fly larvae fell from the ceiling on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a big rodent scaled the curtains in that space.

After an acquaintance handed me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living at my family home, but the tale of the house located on the coastline felt familiar in my view, longing as I felt. This is a novel featuring a possessed noisy, atmospheric home and a young woman who eats chalk from the shoreline. I loved the novel immensely and returned frequently to the story, consistently uncovering {something