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A Renowned Horror Author

A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense

I discovered this story long ago and it has lingered with me ever since. The so-called “summer people” happen to be the Allisons from New York, who occupy an identical remote rural cabin every summer. During this visit, in place of heading back to the city, they opt to lengthen their stay an extra month – something that seems to alarm each resident in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that no one has ever stayed in the area after the end of summer. Regardless, the couple are resolved to remain, and at that point things start to get increasingly weird. The person who delivers the kerosene refuses to sell to the couple. No one agrees to bring food to the cabin, and at the time they attempt to travel to the community, the car won’t start. A tempest builds, the energy of their radio fade, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people huddled together in their summer cottage and waited”. What could be this couple expecting? What could the locals be aware of? Whenever I read the writer’s unnerving and inspiring story, I remember that the best horror originates in that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman

In this short story two people journey to an ordinary seaside town in which chimes sound the whole time, an incessant ringing that is annoying and inexplicable. The initial truly frightening episode happens at night, when they opt to walk around and they are unable to locate the sea. There’s sand, there is the odor of decaying seafood and brine, surf is audible, but the ocean appears spectral, or another thing and worse. It’s just deeply malevolent and every time I visit to the coast after dark I recall this tale which spoiled the sea at night in my view – in a good way.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, he’s not – return to the hotel and discover the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, necro-orgy and mortality and youth meets danse macabre chaos. It’s a chilling meditation on desire and decline, a pair of individuals aging together as a couple, the connection and aggression and tenderness within wedlock.

Not just the most frightening, but probably among the finest brief tales available, and an individual preference. I read it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of these tales to be published in Argentina a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this book by a pool in France recently. Although it was sunny I experienced an icy feeling within me. I also experienced the electricity of excitement. I was writing my latest book, and I faced a block. I was uncertain if it was possible a proper method to write some of the fearful things the story includes. Going through this book, I saw that it was possible.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a dark flight into the thoughts of a murderer, the protagonist, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who slaughtered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee during a specific period. Infamously, the killer was consumed with producing a compliant victim that would remain by his side and attempted numerous horrific efforts to achieve this.

The actions the story tells are terrible, but similarly terrifying is its mental realism. Quentin P’s terrible, fragmented world is plainly told in spare prose, details omitted. The reader is plunged caught in his thoughts, forced to witness thoughts and actions that horrify. The foreignness of his thinking is like a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Entering this story is less like reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and later started experiencing nightmares. Once, the horror involved a nightmare in which I was trapped within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I realized that I had torn off the slat off the window, trying to get out. That house was decaying; when storms came the downstairs hall became inundated, maggots came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and once a big rodent climbed the drapes in that space.

Once a companion handed me this author’s book, I was residing elsewhere in my childhood residence, but the tale regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to me, homesick as I felt. It’s a story concerning a ghostly clamorous, atmospheric home and a girl who eats chalk from the shoreline. I adored the novel deeply and went back again and again to it, consistently uncovering {something