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A Renowned Horror Author

A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense

I discovered this tale some time back and it has haunted me ever since. The titular “summer people” happen to be a family from New York, who rent a particular remote lakeside house annually. This time, in place of returning to urban life, they decide to extend their stay for a month longer – an action that appears to unsettle each resident in the adjacent village. Each repeats a similar vague warning that nobody has lingered in the area beyond the end of summer. Even so, the Allisons are determined to stay, and that is the moment events begin to become stranger. The man who delivers fuel won’t sell for them. Nobody agrees to bring food to the cottage, and when the family endeavor to drive into town, the automobile fails to start. A storm gathers, the batteries within the device die, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple crowded closely inside their cabin and anticipated”. What could be this couple expecting? What might the townspeople be aware of? Each occasion I peruse Jackson’s disturbing and thought-provoking tale, I recall that the best horror originates in that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative two people go to a common coastal village where church bells toll continuously, an incessant ringing that is irritating and unexplainable. The first extremely terrifying episode occurs after dark, at the time they decide to walk around and they fail to see the ocean. The beach is there, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and seawater, surf is audible, but the water is a ghost, or a different entity and even more alarming. It’s just insanely sinister and each occasion I travel to the coast at night I remember this tale that destroyed the sea at night in my view – positively.

The young couple – the woman is adolescent, he’s not – go back to the hotel and find out why the bells ring, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden intersects with grim ballet bedlam. It’s a chilling meditation regarding craving and deterioration, two people growing old jointly as partners, the bond and brutality and gentleness of marriage.

Not just the most frightening, but perhaps one of the best concise narratives available, and a beloved choice. I encountered it in Spanish, in the initial publication of this author’s works to appear in Argentina a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer

I delved into this narrative by a pool overseas in 2020. Although it was sunny I felt cold creep within me. Additionally, I sensed the excitement of anticipation. I was working on a new project, and I encountered a block. I didn’t know whether there existed any good way to write various frightening aspects the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I realized that it could be done.

Published in 1995, the book is a grim journey within the psyche of a murderer, the main character, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who killed and cut apart 17 young men and boys in a city between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, this person was fixated with producing a zombie sex slave who would stay by his side and made many horrific efforts to achieve this.

The actions the book depicts are terrible, but equally frightening is its emotional authenticity. The character’s dreadful, fragmented world is plainly told with concise language, details omitted. The audience is plunged stuck in his mind, obliged to observe ideas and deeds that appal. The foreignness of his thinking feels like a tangible impact – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Starting this book is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the terror involved a nightmare in which I was trapped in a box and, as I roused, I found that I had torn off a piece from the window, trying to get out. That building was decaying; when it rained heavily the ground floor corridor became inundated, maggots fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and on one occasion a sizeable vermin climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.

After an acquaintance presented me with this author’s book, I was no longer living in my childhood residence, but the narrative about the home high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to me, nostalgic as I was. It’s a novel featuring a possessed clamorous, atmospheric home and a girl who eats limestone from the cliffs. I loved the book deeply and came back repeatedly to it, always finding {something