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A Renowned Horror Author

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I read this story years ago and it has lingered with me ever since. The titular “summer people” turn out to be a family urban dwellers, who lease the same isolated lakeside house annually. This time, rather than returning to the city, they opt to extend their stay a few more weeks – something that seems to alarm everyone in the nearby town. Each repeats a similar vague warning that nobody has lingered in the area past Labor Day. Nonetheless, the Allisons are resolved to stay, and at that point situations commence to get increasingly weird. The individual who supplies oil won’t sell to them. Not a single person agrees to bring supplies to the cabin, and as they endeavor to go to the village, their vehicle refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the energy within the device fade, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people crowded closely within their rental and waited”. What are this couple waiting for? What might the residents understand? Each occasion I revisit the writer’s disturbing and influential story, I’m reminded that the best horror originates in what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a couple journey to a common coastal village in which chimes sound the whole time, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and unexplainable. The opening very scary episode takes place after dark, when they choose to take a walk and they are unable to locate the water. Sand is present, there’s the smell of rotting fish and brine, surf is audible, but the sea is a ghost, or something else and even more alarming. It’s just profoundly ominous and every time I visit to a beach at night I think about this story that destroyed the ocean after dark for me – favorably.

The recent spouses – she’s very young, the man is mature – go back to the hotel and learn the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, necro-orgy and death-and-the-maiden encounters danse macabre bedlam. It’s an unnerving reflection about longing and decay, a pair of individuals growing old jointly as partners, the bond and brutality and gentleness in matrimony.

Not just the most terrifying, but probably a top example of brief tales available, and a beloved choice. I read it in Spanish, in the initial publication of these tales to be released in Argentina in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into Zombie beside the swimming area in the French countryside recently. Despite the sunshine I sensed an icy feeling within me. I also experienced the electricity of fascination. I was writing a new project, and I encountered a wall. I was uncertain if there was an effective approach to craft some of the fearful things the book contains. Reading Zombie, I understood that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a dark flight through the mind of a young serial killer, Quentin P, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who murdered and dismembered numerous individuals in Milwaukee over a decade. As is well-known, Dahmer was consumed with producing a zombie sex slave that would remain by his side and made many grisly attempts to achieve this.

The deeds the book depicts are appalling, but equally frightening is its own mental realism. The character’s terrible, shattered existence is directly described using minimal words, details omitted. The audience is sunk deep stuck in his mind, forced to witness mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The foreignness of his psyche feels like a bodily jolt – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Entering this book feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I walked in my sleep and later started having night terrors. On one occasion, the horror featured a vision during which I was trapped in a box and, upon awakening, I discovered that I had ripped a piece out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That building was falling apart; when storms came the downstairs hall filled with water, insect eggs came down from the roof onto the bed, and on one occasion a sizeable vermin climbed the drapes in that space.

When a friend gave me this author’s book, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the narrative regarding the building perched on the cliffs appeared known to me, homesick at that time. It’s a novel about a haunted noisy, emotional house and a young woman who eats chalk off the rocks. I loved the novel immensely and came back frequently to its pages, consistently uncovering {something