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A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I read this narrative long ago and it has lingered with me from that moment. The titular “summer people” turn out to be the Allisons from the city, who lease a particular off-grid country cottage every summer. This time, rather than heading back to the city, they choose to extend their vacation for a month longer – something that seems to alarm each resident in the surrounding community. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that not a soul has ever stayed by the water after the end of summer. Even so, they are determined to stay, and that is the moment things start to grow more bizarre. The man who brings oil won’t sell to the couple. Not a single person will deliver supplies to the cabin, and when the family endeavor to go to the village, the automobile fails to start. A tempest builds, the batteries within the device die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the elderly couple crowded closely in their summer cottage and expected”. What could be this couple waiting for? What might the townspeople understand? Whenever I revisit Jackson’s chilling and thought-provoking narrative, I’m reminded that the finest fright comes from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by a noted author

In this brief tale a pair go to an ordinary seaside town where church bells toll constantly, a constant chiming that is bothersome and inexplicable. The opening truly frightening moment takes place during the evening, at the time they decide to walk around and they fail to see the sea. The beach is there, the scent exists of decaying seafood and seawater, waves crash, but the sea appears spectral, or a different entity and even more alarming. It’s just profoundly ominous and each occasion I travel to the coast at night I recall this story that destroyed the beach in the evening for me – in a good way.

The newlyweds – the woman is adolescent, he’s not – go back to the inn and find out the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and demise and innocence encounters danse macabre bedlam. It is a disturbing reflection regarding craving and decline, two people aging together as spouses, the connection and aggression and affection in matrimony.

Not only the most terrifying, but perhaps among the finest brief tales out there, and a beloved choice. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of this author’s works to appear locally several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I perused this book by a pool overseas a few years ago. Although it was sunny I experienced cold creep within me. I also experienced the excitement of anticipation. I was writing a new project, and I faced an obstacle. I wasn’t sure whether there existed a proper method to craft certain terrifying elements the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I realized that there was a way.

Published in 1995, the story is a grim journey through the mind of a murderer, the protagonist, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who slaughtered and cut apart multiple victims in a city between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, Dahmer was fixated with creating a submissive individual who would never leave him and attempted numerous horrific efforts to do so.

The acts the story tells are terrible, but just as scary is its own mental realism. The character’s terrible, shattered existence is plainly told using minimal words, identities hidden. The audience is immersed caught in his thoughts, forced to observe thoughts and actions that appal. The foreignness of his mind feels like a physical shock – or being stranded in an empty realm. Entering this book is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and subsequently commenced having night terrors. On one occasion, the fear featured a dream during which I was confined within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I realized that I had ripped the slat out of the window frame, trying to get out. That building was crumbling; when it rained heavily the ground floor corridor filled with water, insect eggs dropped from above into the bedroom, and at one time a large rat ascended the window coverings in that space.

When a friend presented me with this author’s book, I was residing elsewhere in my childhood residence, but the narrative of the house high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable in my view, homesick at that time. This is a novel concerning a ghostly loud, sentimental building and a young woman who consumes calcium from the shoreline. I loved the book deeply and went back frequently to it, consistently uncovering {something