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A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I discovered this story years ago and it has haunted me from that moment. The so-called “summer people” are a family urban dwellers, who rent an identical off-grid country cottage each year. This time, instead of heading back to the city, they choose to extend their stay a few more weeks – something that seems to unsettle everyone in the nearby town. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that not a soul has ever stayed in the area beyond the holiday. Nonetheless, the Allisons are determined to stay, and at that point things start to grow more bizarre. The man who delivers oil won’t sell to the couple. No one is willing to supply supplies to the cabin, and as the family try to go to the village, their vehicle refuses to operate. A storm gathers, the batteries within the device diminish, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple crowded closely in their summer cottage and waited”. What are the Allisons anticipating? What might the residents know? Every time I revisit this author’s disturbing and inspiring tale, I recall that the finest fright originates in the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this short story a pair journey to a typical coastal village in which chimes sound continuously, a constant chiming that is annoying and unexplainable. The opening truly frightening scene happens at night, at the time they decide to walk around and they can’t find the sea. There’s sand, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and seawater, surf is audible, but the ocean appears spectral, or something else and even more alarming. It is simply profoundly ominous and whenever I visit to the shore in the evening I recall this tale which spoiled the beach in the evening in my view – in a good way.

The recent spouses – the wife is youthful, the husband is older – go back to the inn and learn why the bells ring, through an extended episode of confinement, macabre revelry and mortality and youth meets danse macabre chaos. It is a disturbing reflection about longing and deterioration, two people maturing in tandem as a couple, the attachment and aggression and gentleness of marriage.

Not merely the most terrifying, but probably a top example of concise narratives available, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to appear in this country several years back.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I delved into this narrative near the water in France a few years ago. Although it was sunny I sensed a chill over me. I also felt the excitement of excitement. I was working on my third novel, and I faced a wall. I was uncertain whether there existed an effective approach to write some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I saw that it was possible.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a grim journey within the psyche of a murderer, the main character, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who killed and dismembered 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee over a decade. Notoriously, Dahmer was fixated with creating a submissive individual who would never leave him and carried out several horrific efforts to achieve this.

The actions the story tells are appalling, but equally frightening is the mental realism. Quentin P’s awful, fragmented world is simply narrated using minimal words, identities hidden. The audience is sunk deep stuck in his mind, forced to witness mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The foreignness of his thinking feels like a physical shock – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Entering this story is not just reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by a gifted writer

When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and eventually began having night terrors. Once, the terror involved a nightmare during which I was trapped in a box and, when I woke up, I realized that I had removed the slat off the window, attempting to escape. That building was crumbling; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall flooded, maggots fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and on one occasion a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in my sister’s room.

When a friend presented me with the story, I was residing elsewhere in my childhood residence, but the tale about the home located on the coastline appeared known in my view, nostalgic at that time. It is a story about a haunted clamorous, emotional house and a female character who eats chalk from the shoreline. I loved the book deeply and went back again and again to it, always finding {something