🔗 Share this article

A Renowned Horror Author

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I read this story long ago and it has haunted me ever since. The titular “summer people” are a couple from New York, who rent the same off-grid rural cabin each year. On this occasion, rather than heading back to urban life, they decide to prolong their vacation for a month longer – a decision that to disturb each resident in the surrounding community. Each repeats the same veiled caution that nobody has remained at the lake after Labor Day. Nonetheless, the couple insist to remain, and at that point things start to grow more bizarre. The man who supplies fuel declines to provide to them. No one will deliver food to the cabin, and at the time the family endeavor to travel to the community, their vehicle won’t start. A storm gathers, the power in the radio fade, and when night comes, “the elderly couple crowded closely in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What could be this couple expecting? What could the locals know? Every time I revisit Jackson’s disturbing and thought-provoking narrative, I’m reminded that the top terror comes from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this brief tale two people go to a typical seaside town where bells ring the whole time, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and puzzling. The opening extremely terrifying episode occurs during the evening, as they decide to take a walk and they can’t find the ocean. Sand is present, there’s the smell of rotting fish and brine, surf is audible, but the ocean appears spectral, or another thing and worse. It’s just profoundly ominous and every time I travel to the coast at night I remember this story which spoiled the ocean after dark for me – favorably.

The recent spouses – she’s very young, he’s not – return to their lodging and learn the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, necro-orgy and death-and-the-maiden intersects with dance of death bedlam. It’s an unnerving contemplation regarding craving and decay, two bodies maturing in tandem as partners, the bond and aggression and gentleness within wedlock.

Not just the most terrifying, but perhaps a top example of short stories available, and a beloved choice. I read it en español, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to be published in Argentina in 2011.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into Zombie by a pool in the French countryside in 2020. Even with the bright weather I experienced a chill within me. I also felt the excitement of anticipation. I was writing my latest book, and I had hit an obstacle. I didn’t know if it was possible a proper method to write various frightening aspects the book contains. Going through this book, I saw that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the book is a dark flight within the psyche of a young serial killer, the main character, inspired by a notorious figure, the serial killer 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 by his side and attempted numerous macabre trials to accomplish it.

The acts the story tells are appalling, but similarly terrifying is its mental realism. The character’s dreadful, shattered existence is simply narrated using minimal words, identities hidden. The reader is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, forced to see mental processes and behaviors that appal. The alien nature of his thinking feels like a tangible impact – or finding oneself isolated on a desolate planet. Going into this book is less like reading but a complete immersion. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I sleepwalked and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. Once, the fear involved a vision in which I was stuck within an enclosure and, as I roused, I realized that I had ripped the slat out of the window frame, trying to get out. That home was decaying; when it rained heavily the entranceway filled with water, fly larvae dropped from above onto the bed, and at one time a large rat scaled the curtains in that space.

When a friend gave me the story, I had moved out with my parents, but the narrative about the home high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to me, nostalgic at that time. It is a book featuring a possessed noisy, sentimental building and a female character who consumes chalk off the rocks. I loved the story so much and came back frequently to it, each time discovering {something