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A Renowned Horror Author

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I read this story long ago and it has stayed with me ever since. The so-called seasonal visitors are a couple urban dwellers, who rent a particular remote country cottage each year. This time, rather than heading back home, they opt to lengthen their vacation a few more weeks – a decision that to unsettle all the locals in the adjacent village. All pass on an identical cryptic advice that not a soul has remained by the water after the end of summer. Regardless, the Allisons are resolved to stay, and that is the moment events begin to become stranger. The individual who supplies fuel declines to provide to the couple. Nobody is willing to supply supplies to their home, and at the time the Allisons endeavor to drive into town, the automobile won’t start. A storm gathers, the power of their radio diminish, and as darkness falls, “the two old people crowded closely inside their cabin and expected”. What could be the Allisons expecting? What do the residents know? Every time I read this author’s unnerving and influential narrative, I’m reminded that the top terror comes from what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a pair travel to a common beach community where bells ring constantly, a constant chiming that is annoying and unexplainable. The initial truly frightening moment happens at night, at the time they decide to take a walk and they are unable to locate the sea. The beach is there, the scent exists of decaying seafood and salt, waves crash, but the ocean appears spectral, or another thing and worse. It’s just insanely sinister and whenever I travel to a beach at night I think about this narrative which spoiled the beach in the evening for me – favorably.

The newlyweds – the wife is youthful, he’s not – return to their lodging and find out the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and demise and innocence meets danse macabre chaos. It’s an unnerving contemplation about longing and decline, two bodies maturing in tandem as partners, the attachment and violence and tenderness of marriage.

Not just the most terrifying, but probably one of the best short stories out there, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in Spanish, in the initial publication of this author’s works to be published in this country several years back.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I read this narrative near the water in France in 2020. Although it was sunny I experienced cold creep over me. I also experienced the thrill of excitement. I was working on my third novel, and I faced a wall. I didn’t know if there was an effective approach to craft various frightening aspects the story includes. Going through this book, I saw that it could be done.

Released decades ago, the novel is a bleak exploration through the mind of a murderer, Quentin P, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who killed and dismembered multiple victims in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, the killer was obsessed with producing a submissive individual who would never leave by his side and made many grisly attempts to do so.

The actions the novel describes are horrific, but just as scary is its psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s awful, shattered existence is simply narrated using minimal words, identities hidden. The reader is sunk deep stuck in his mind, forced to see ideas and deeds that appal. The alien nature of his psyche feels like a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated on a desolate planet. Going into Zombie is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

When I was a child, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the horror included a vision during which I was confined in a box and, upon awakening, I discovered that I had removed a part off the window, attempting to escape. That building was falling apart; when storms came the entranceway became inundated, insect eggs dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and once a big rodent climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.

Once a companion presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere in my childhood residence, but the narrative of the house located on the coastline seemed recognizable in my view, nostalgic as I was. It is a story featuring a possessed clamorous, emotional house and a female character who consumes limestone from the shoreline. I adored the novel deeply and returned again and again to its pages, consistently uncovering {something