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A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I discovered this narrative years ago and it has haunted me ever since. The named vacationers happen to be the Allisons from New York, who lease a particular isolated country cottage annually. On this occasion, instead of going back to urban life, they choose to lengthen their holiday for a month longer – an action that appears to unsettle everyone in the surrounding community. Each repeats an identical cryptic advice that no one has lingered at the lake after the end of summer. Regardless, the couple insist to remain, and at that point situations commence to get increasingly weird. The individual who delivers oil won’t sell to them. Not a single person is willing to supply groceries to the cottage, and as the family attempt to travel to the community, the car fails to start. A storm gathers, the energy within the device fade, and when night comes, “the two old people clung to each other within their rental and waited”. What might be the Allisons waiting for? What could the townspeople be aware of? Every time I read Jackson’s disturbing and thought-provoking story, I remember that the best horror comes from what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this short story a couple go to a common beach community where church bells toll constantly, an incessant ringing that is irritating and puzzling. The initial very scary scene happens at night, as they choose to go for a stroll and they can’t find the water. Sand is present, there is the odor of rotting fish and brine, surf is audible, but the water appears spectral, or something else and more dreadful. It is truly deeply malevolent and whenever I visit to the coast in the evening I think about this story that destroyed the beach in the evening for me – favorably.

The young couple – the woman is adolescent, the husband is older – return to the inn and find out why the bells ring, through an extended episode of confinement, macabre revelry and mortality and youth encounters grim ballet chaos. It’s a chilling meditation about longing and deterioration, two people growing old jointly as partners, the bond and violence and affection in matrimony.

Not just the scariest, but probably among the finest short stories in existence, and an individual preference. I read it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of Aickman stories to appear in Argentina several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I perused Zombie near the water in France a few years ago. Although it was sunny I sensed cold creep over me. Additionally, I sensed the excitement of excitement. I was working on a new project, and I encountered an obstacle. I didn’t know whether there existed any good way to craft some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Experiencing this novel, I understood that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a bleak exploration within the psyche of a murderer, the protagonist, based on an infamous individual, the criminal who slaughtered and mutilated multiple victims in a city between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, the killer was obsessed with creating a submissive individual who would stay him and made many macabre trials to do so.

The deeds the novel describes are appalling, but just as scary is its own emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s awful, broken reality is directly described using minimal words, names redacted. You is plunged caught in his thoughts, forced to witness mental processes and behaviors that appal. The alien nature of his mind resembles a tangible impact – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Entering this book is not just reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I sleepwalked and later started experiencing nightmares. At one point, the horror featured a dream where I was stuck within an enclosure and, as I roused, I discovered that I had ripped a piece out of the window frame, 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 on one occasion a large rat climbed the drapes in that space.

When a friend handed me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the tale of the house perched on the cliffs appeared known in my view, homesick as I was. It’s a book about a haunted loud, atmospheric home and a girl who eats limestone off the rocks. I loved the story immensely and came back repeatedly to its pages, each time discovering {something