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A Renowned Horror Author

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I encountered this tale long ago and it has haunted me ever since. The titular vacationers happen to be a family from the city, who occupy the same isolated country cottage annually. This time, in place of returning to urban life, they decide to extend their stay a few more weeks – an action that appears to alarm each resident in the surrounding community. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that no one has lingered by the water past the holiday. Nonetheless, they are resolved to not leave, and that is the moment events begin to become stranger. The person who supplies oil won’t sell for them. Not a single person will deliver food to their home, and when the family attempt to drive into town, the automobile won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the energy within the device die, and when night comes, “the aged individuals huddled together in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What are the Allisons expecting? What might the residents be aware of? Whenever I revisit this author’s chilling and inspiring tale, I remember that the finest fright stems from what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this short story a couple travel to a common beach community where bells ring the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and inexplicable. The initial very scary scene takes place after dark, as they choose to go for a stroll and they can’t find the sea. Sand is present, there is the odor of rotting fish and seawater, there are waves, but the ocean seems phantom, or another thing and worse. It is simply deeply malevolent and every time I visit to the shore at night I recall this story that ruined the beach in the evening in my view – favorably.

The recent spouses – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – return to their lodging and learn why the bells ring, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and demise and innocence meets grim ballet chaos. It is a disturbing reflection regarding craving and decay, two bodies maturing in tandem as a couple, the attachment and brutality and gentleness in matrimony.

Not only the most frightening, but perhaps one of the best short stories in existence, and a personal favourite. I experienced it en español, in the first edition of this author’s works to be released in Argentina in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this narrative near the water overseas in 2020. Although it was sunny I experienced a chill over me. Additionally, I sensed the thrill of anticipation. I was working on a new project, and I faced a wall. I wasn’t sure if it was possible a proper method to write some of the fearful things the book contains. Going through this book, I saw that it was possible.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a dark flight through the mind of a criminal, the main character, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who killed and dismembered 17 young men and boys in a city over a decade. Infamously, Dahmer was consumed with producing a compliant victim who would never leave him and made many grisly attempts to achieve this.

The deeds the novel describes are appalling, but equally frightening is its mental realism. The character’s awful, fragmented world is simply narrated with concise language, details omitted. The reader is plunged stuck in his mind, forced to observe ideas and deeds that appal. The strangeness of his psyche is like a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Starting Zombie feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I sleepwalked and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the terror involved a nightmare where I was stuck within an enclosure and, upon awakening, I discovered that I had ripped the slat from the window, seeking to leave. That home was falling apart; when storms came the entranceway became inundated, fly larvae came down from the roof onto the bed, and once a large rat climbed the drapes in that space.

After an acquaintance presented me with the story, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the narrative of the house high on the Dover cliffs appeared known to myself, longing as I felt. This is a book about a haunted clamorous, sentimental building and a female character who ingests limestone off the rocks. I cherished the novel immensely and returned again and again to the story, consistently uncovering {something