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A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People by a master of suspense

I read this narrative years ago and it has lingered with me from that moment. The so-called seasonal visitors happen to be a family from the city, who rent a particular off-grid lakeside house annually. On this occasion, instead of going back to urban life, they decide to lengthen their vacation an extra month – something that seems to unsettle everyone in the nearby town. All pass on an identical cryptic advice that no one has remained at the lake beyond the end of summer. Nonetheless, they are determined to not leave, and that’s when events begin to grow more bizarre. The man who supplies oil declines to provide for them. Not a single person is willing to supply food to their home, and as the family endeavor to travel to the community, their vehicle refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the batteries of their radio fade, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple huddled together inside their cabin and waited”. What are they expecting? What could the residents know? Each occasion I revisit the writer’s unnerving and influential tale, I recall that the best horror comes from what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a pair travel to a common seaside town in which chimes sound continuously, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and puzzling. The opening extremely terrifying episode happens after dark, at the time they choose to walk around and they fail to see the ocean. Sand is present, there is the odor of decaying seafood and seawater, surf is audible, but the water seems phantom, or another thing and worse. It is simply deeply malevolent and each occasion I go to a beach at night I remember this tale that destroyed the beach in the evening for me – favorably.

The young couple – the woman is adolescent, the husband is older – go back to the inn and find out the reason for the chiming, during a prolonged scene of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth intersects with danse macabre chaos. It is a disturbing contemplation regarding craving and decay, two bodies maturing in tandem as a couple, the bond and aggression and gentleness in matrimony.

Not only the most terrifying, but probably a top example of brief tales available, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of these tales to appear locally a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I read Zombie by a pool in France in 2020. Despite the sunshine I sensed an icy feeling over me. I also felt the electricity of fascination. I was writing my latest book, and I had hit a wall. I wasn’t sure if there was a proper method to craft certain terrifying elements the book contains. Going through this book, I understood that it was possible.

Published in 1995, the novel is a grim journey within the psyche of a murderer, the main character, inspired by an infamous individual, the criminal who killed and mutilated 17 young men and boys in a city during a specific period. Infamously, Dahmer was fixated with creating a zombie sex slave who would stay by his side and attempted numerous horrific efforts to accomplish it.

The actions the novel describes are appalling, but equally frightening is its own mental realism. Quentin P’s awful, broken reality is plainly told using minimal words, identities hidden. The audience is plunged trapped in his consciousness, compelled to observe ideas and deeds that horrify. The alien nature of his thinking feels like a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated on a desolate planet. Starting Zombie is not just reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by a gifted writer

In my early years, I walked in my sleep and subsequently commenced having night terrors. Once, the horror featured a vision in which I was trapped in a box and, when I woke up, I realized that I had torn off a part out of the window frame, trying to get out. That building was crumbling; when storms came the ground floor corridor became inundated, insect eggs came down from the roof onto the bed, and once a large rat scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

After an acquaintance gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out at my family home, but the story about the home high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to me, longing at that time. It’s a story concerning a ghostly loud, sentimental building and a female character who eats chalk from the shoreline. I loved the novel so much and came back repeatedly to it, always finding {something