🔗 Share this article

A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People by a master of suspense

I read this story some time back and it has haunted me from that moment. The so-called seasonal visitors are a couple from New York, who occupy the same remote lakeside house every summer. This time, instead of returning to urban life, they opt to prolong their holiday for a month longer – a decision that to disturb each resident in the surrounding community. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that not a soul has lingered in the area beyond the holiday. Even so, the couple insist to remain, and that’s when things start to become stranger. The man who supplies the kerosene refuses to sell for them. Not a single person will deliver groceries to their home, and when the Allisons attempt to travel to the community, the automobile won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the batteries of their radio diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the aged individuals crowded closely in their summer cottage and waited”. What might be the Allisons expecting? What could the townspeople know? Every time I revisit the writer’s chilling and thought-provoking tale, I remember that the best horror originates in what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman

In this short story a pair go to an ordinary seaside town in which chimes sound the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is annoying and inexplicable. The initial extremely terrifying scene occurs after dark, at the time they opt to walk around and they fail to see the water. The beach is there, there’s the smell of rotting fish and seawater, waves crash, but the ocean appears spectral, or a different entity and more dreadful. It’s just profoundly ominous and whenever I go to the shore after dark I remember this story that ruined the sea at night to my mind – positively.

The newlyweds – the woman is adolescent, he’s not – return to the inn and learn the reason for the chiming, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and mortality and youth meets danse macabre chaos. It is a disturbing meditation regarding craving and deterioration, two bodies maturing in tandem as partners, the connection and brutality and gentleness within wedlock.

Not only the scariest, but probably among the finest concise narratives in existence, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in Spanish, in the first edition of Aickman stories to be released in this country several years back.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer

I perused Zombie beside the swimming area in the French countryside recently. Although it was sunny I felt an icy feeling within me. I also felt the thrill of excitement. I was writing a new project, and I faced a wall. I wasn’t sure whether there existed an effective approach to compose certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I realized that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a dark flight through the mind of a criminal, the protagonist, based on an infamous individual, the serial killer who slaughtered and mutilated numerous individuals in the Midwest during a specific period. Infamously, the killer was fixated with producing a submissive individual that would remain by his side and attempted numerous grisly attempts to do so.

The actions the novel describes are terrible, but just as scary is the mental realism. The character’s awful, broken reality is plainly told with concise language, names redacted. The audience is immersed caught in his thoughts, compelled to witness mental processes and behaviors that shock. The strangeness of his mind resembles a tangible impact – or finding oneself isolated on a desolate planet. Going into this story is not just reading than a full body experience. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and subsequently commenced suffering from bad dreams. Once, the horror involved a vision during which I was trapped inside a container and, as I roused, I found that I had torn off a part out of the window frame, attempting to escape. That home was falling apart; when storms came the downstairs hall filled with water, maggots came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and at one time a large rat scaled the curtains in that space.

Once a companion presented me with this author’s book, I was no longer living at my family home, but the tale regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to me, homesick as I felt. It’s a book concerning a ghostly noisy, sentimental building and a female character who consumes limestone from the cliffs. I adored the novel immensely and went back repeatedly to its pages, always finding {something