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A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I read this tale long ago and it has haunted me since then. The named seasonal visitors are the Allisons from New York, who occupy a particular remote lakeside house each year. During this visit, rather than heading back to the city, they choose to lengthen their vacation an extra month – a decision that to unsettle each resident in the nearby town. All pass on the same veiled caution that not a soul has remained by the water beyond Labor Day. Nonetheless, the Allisons are resolved to not leave, and at that point events begin to grow more bizarre. The individual who brings the kerosene won’t sell to the couple. No one will deliver groceries to the cabin, and as the Allisons try to travel to the community, the car fails to start. A storm gathers, the power within the device diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people crowded closely inside their cabin and expected”. What might be they anticipating? What might the townspeople know? Each occasion I revisit Jackson’s disturbing and inspiring story, I’m reminded that the finest fright originates in what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative two people journey to an ordinary beach community in which chimes sound the whole time, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and puzzling. The first truly frightening moment takes place at night, when they opt to take a walk and they fail to see the ocean. Sand is present, there is the odor of decaying seafood and seawater, surf is audible, but the sea seems phantom, or something else and more dreadful. It is simply insanely sinister and every time I visit to the shore in the evening I recall this story that destroyed the beach in the evening in my view – positively.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, the husband is older – return to the inn and discover the cause of the ringing, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and demise and innocence meets danse macabre bedlam. It is a disturbing contemplation regarding craving and deterioration, two people aging together as spouses, the connection and brutality and tenderness in matrimony.

Not merely the most terrifying, but perhaps among the finest brief tales out there, and a personal favourite. I encountered it en español, in the first edition of these tales to appear in Argentina a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this book by a pool in the French countryside in 2020. Although it was sunny I sensed an icy feeling through me. I also felt the electricity of anticipation. I was working on my third novel, and I had hit a wall. I was uncertain if there was any good way to compose some of the fearful things the book contains. Experiencing this novel, I realized that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a bleak exploration through the mind of a criminal, the main character, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who killed and mutilated multiple victims in a city during a specific period. As is well-known, this person was obsessed with producing a submissive individual who would stay him and made many grisly attempts to do so.

The actions the book depicts are terrible, but just as scary is the mental realism. The character’s awful, broken reality is directly described using minimal words, names redacted. You is immersed caught in his thoughts, forced to witness thoughts and actions that appal. The strangeness of his mind resembles a physical shock – or getting lost in an empty realm. Entering this book is less like reading than a full body experience. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and later started experiencing nightmares. At one point, the horror featured a nightmare where I was confined inside a container and, upon awakening, I found that I had ripped the slat off the window, trying to get out. That home was decaying; when it rained heavily the entranceway flooded, insect eggs fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and on one occasion a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in the bedroom.

When a friend presented me with the story, I was no longer living with my parents, but the narrative of the house high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to myself, longing as I felt. This is a book about a haunted noisy, sentimental building and a young woman who consumes chalk from the cliffs. I adored the novel so much and returned again and again to it, each time discovering {something