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A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I read this story years ago and it has lingered with me since then. The titular vacationers turn out to be a couple from New York, who rent an identical off-grid lakeside house every summer. On this occasion, instead of going back to the city, they decide to prolong their stay an extra month – a decision that to disturb all the locals in the surrounding community. Each repeats an identical cryptic advice that not a soul has lingered at the lake beyond Labor Day. Even so, the Allisons insist to remain, and that’s when things start to get increasingly weird. The man who supplies fuel refuses to sell to the couple. Not a single person will deliver supplies to their home, and as they try to drive into town, their vehicle fails to start. Bad weather approaches, the power in the radio diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple crowded closely in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What might be this couple anticipating? What might the townspeople know? Each occasion I read the writer’s chilling and thought-provoking narrative, I’m reminded that the best horror originates in that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a couple travel to a typical beach community in which chimes sound the whole time, a constant chiming that is annoying and unexplainable. The initial very scary scene occurs after dark, as they decide to walk around and they are unable to locate the sea. There’s sand, there is the odor of decaying seafood and salt, surf is audible, but the water is a ghost, or a different entity and worse. It’s just insanely sinister and whenever I visit to a beach after dark I recall this tale that destroyed the sea at night in my view – favorably.

The recent spouses – the wife is youthful, the husband is older – return to their lodging and discover the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and death-and-the-maiden encounters dance of death bedlam. It’s an unnerving meditation about longing and deterioration, two bodies aging together as spouses, the connection and brutality and tenderness in matrimony.

Not merely the most terrifying, but likely one of the best concise narratives available, and an individual preference. I encountered it en español, in the first edition of Aickman stories to be published locally in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I read this book beside the swimming area in the French countryside recently. Even with the bright weather I experienced an icy feeling over me. Additionally, I sensed the thrill of fascination. I was writing a new project, and I encountered a wall. I was uncertain whether there existed any good way to craft some of the fearful things the book contains. Reading Zombie, I understood that it was possible.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a dark flight through the mind of a young serial killer, the protagonist, based on a notorious figure, the murderer who slaughtered and dismembered numerous individuals in Milwaukee during a specific period. Infamously, Dahmer was fixated with creating a zombie sex slave who would stay him and attempted numerous macabre trials to accomplish it.

The deeds the story tells are appalling, but just as scary is its emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s awful, fragmented world is directly described in spare prose, details omitted. The reader is plunged stuck in his mind, obliged to see ideas and deeds that shock. The strangeness of his psyche resembles a bodily jolt – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Entering Zombie is not just reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I walked in my sleep and later started experiencing nightmares. On one occasion, the horror included a vision where I was trapped in a box and, upon awakening, I realized that I had torn off the slat out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That building was crumbling; when storms came the entranceway became inundated, fly larvae fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and once a big rodent scaled the curtains in that space.

Once a companion presented me with the story, I had moved out at my family home, but the story about the home perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable to myself, longing at that time. It is a book concerning a ghostly loud, atmospheric home and a girl who ingests chalk from the shoreline. I loved the novel immensely and returned repeatedly to it, each time discovering {something