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A Renowned Horror Author

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I discovered this story long ago and it has lingered with me since then. The named seasonal visitors turn out to be a family urban dwellers, who rent the same remote country cottage every summer. During this visit, rather than returning to the city, they opt to lengthen their holiday for a month longer – a decision that to unsettle everyone in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that no one has remained by the water beyond the holiday. Regardless, they are resolved to not leave, and that’s when things start to grow more bizarre. The man who supplies fuel declines to provide to the couple. Not a single person will deliver supplies to their home, and when they try to drive into town, their vehicle won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the batteries in the radio fade, and as darkness falls, “the two old people crowded closely in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What might be this couple expecting? What do the residents understand? Each occasion I peruse the writer’s disturbing and inspiring story, I remember that the best horror originates in the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative two people journey to a typical beach community where bells ring continuously, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and unexplainable. The first truly frightening episode occurs during the evening, as they choose to take a walk and they can’t find the ocean. The beach is there, there’s the smell of rotting fish and brine, there are waves, but the sea seems phantom, or a different entity and more dreadful. It is truly deeply malevolent and whenever I go to a beach after dark I think about this narrative which spoiled the sea at night to my mind – favorably.

The newlyweds – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – go back to the hotel and discover the reason for the chiming, during a prolonged scene of enclosed spaces, necro-orgy and mortality and youth encounters grim ballet chaos. It’s an unnerving meditation about longing and decline, two people maturing in tandem as a couple, the bond and violence and affection in matrimony.

Not only the scariest, but probably one of the best brief tales available, and an individual preference. I read it en español, in the initial publication of these tales to appear in Argentina several years back.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I read this narrative near the water in France a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I felt a chill through me. I also experienced the electricity of fascination. I was working on my latest book, and I faced an obstacle. I was uncertain if it was possible an effective approach to write some of the fearful things the story includes. Going through this book, I realized that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the novel is a grim journey into the thoughts of a murderer, Quentin P, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who slaughtered and dismembered multiple victims in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, this person was consumed with producing a zombie sex slave that would remain by his side and attempted numerous grisly attempts to do so.

The acts the novel describes are terrible, but equally frightening is its mental realism. Quentin P’s awful, broken reality is directly described in spare prose, names redacted. The reader is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, compelled to observe mental processes and behaviors that shock. The foreignness of his thinking is like a bodily jolt – or being stranded in an empty realm. Entering this book feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

During my youth, I sleepwalked and later started experiencing nightmares. At one point, the horror included a vision where I was confined within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had removed a part off the window, seeking to leave. That house was falling apart; when storms came the entranceway flooded, maggots came down from the roof into the bedroom, and at one time a large rat climbed the drapes in the bedroom.

After an acquaintance handed me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out at my family home, but the narrative regarding the building perched on the cliffs appeared known in my view, homesick as I was. This is a story featuring a possessed noisy, emotional house and a young woman who consumes calcium from the shoreline. I loved the story immensely and went back frequently to it, each time discovering {something