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A Renowned Horror Author

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I discovered this story long ago and it has stayed with me from that moment. The titular seasonal visitors happen to be a family urban dwellers, who occupy an identical off-grid rural cabin each year. This time, instead of returning to urban life, they choose to extend their stay for a month longer – something that seems to disturb all the locals in the adjacent village. All pass on a similar vague warning that not a soul has ever stayed by the water beyond the end of summer. Nonetheless, they are determined to not leave, and at that point events begin to grow more bizarre. The man who brings oil won’t sell to them. Nobody is willing to supply supplies to the cottage, and when the family attempt to travel to the community, the car fails to start. A storm gathers, the batteries within the device fade, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple crowded closely inside their cabin and anticipated”. What might be they expecting? What might the locals be aware of? Every time I peruse Jackson’s chilling and thought-provoking story, I remember that the top terror stems from that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by a noted author

In this short story two people travel to a typical coastal village where bells ring constantly, a constant chiming that is annoying and inexplicable. The initial very scary episode occurs at night, at the time they choose to walk around and they are unable to locate the ocean. Sand is present, there is the odor of rotting fish and seawater, waves crash, but the water is a ghost, or something else and even more alarming. It’s just deeply malevolent and each occasion I visit to the shore at night I recall this narrative which spoiled the sea at night to my mind – in a good way.

The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, the husband is older – return to the inn and learn the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and death-and-the-maiden meets dance of death pandemonium. It’s an unnerving reflection on desire and decay, two people growing old jointly as a couple, the connection and brutality and tenderness within wedlock.

Not just the most frightening, but likely a top example of brief tales available, and a beloved choice. I experienced it in Spanish, in the first edition of Aickman stories to be released in this country in 2011.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this narrative by a pool in the French countryside recently. Although it was sunny I sensed cold creep through me. I also felt the excitement of fascination. I was composing my third novel, and I encountered a block. I wasn’t sure if there was a proper method to write various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I realized that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the story is a grim journey into the thoughts of a murderer, the protagonist, based on an infamous individual, the criminal who murdered and dismembered multiple victims in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, the killer was obsessed with producing a compliant victim who would stay with him and attempted numerous macabre trials to do so.

The acts the book depicts are terrible, but equally frightening is the mental realism. The protagonist’s dreadful, fragmented world is simply narrated in spare prose, identities hidden. You is sunk deep stuck in his mind, compelled to observe mental processes and behaviors that appal. The foreignness of his mind is like a physical shock – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Starting Zombie feels different from 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 eventually began suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the fear featured a nightmare in which I was stuck in a box and, as I roused, I found that I had ripped a part from the window, seeking to leave. That building was decaying; when storms came the ground floor corridor became inundated, insect eggs fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and once a big rodent scaled the curtains in my sister’s room.

Once a companion presented me with the story, I was residing elsewhere in my childhood residence, but the story regarding the building perched on the cliffs appeared known to me, longing as I was. It is a novel about a haunted loud, emotional house and a young woman who ingests limestone from the shoreline. I cherished the novel deeply and came back again and again to its pages, each time discovering {something