🔗 Share this article

A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I discovered this tale long ago and it has stayed with me since then. The named seasonal visitors turn out to be a couple from the city, who rent an identical isolated country cottage every summer. During this visit, rather than going back to the city, they decide to extend their stay for a month longer – something that seems to unsettle each resident in the adjacent village. All pass on a similar vague warning that nobody has ever stayed in the area past the holiday. Nonetheless, the Allisons insist to remain, and that is the moment situations commence to grow more bizarre. The person who brings oil refuses to sell to them. No one agrees to bring groceries to the cottage, and when the family endeavor to go to the village, their vehicle refuses to operate. A storm gathers, the batteries of their radio fade, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people huddled together in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What are the Allisons anticipating? What might the residents be aware of? Whenever I read Jackson’s chilling and inspiring story, I’m reminded that the finest fright stems from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from a noted author

In this brief tale two people go to a common coastal village where church bells toll constantly, a constant chiming that is annoying and inexplicable. The opening extremely terrifying episode occurs during the evening, when they opt to go for a stroll and they fail to see the water. Sand is present, there is the odor of putrid marine life and brine, waves crash, but the water appears spectral, or a different entity and worse. It is simply profoundly ominous and each occasion I go to the coast in the evening I remember this narrative that destroyed the beach in the evening in my view – favorably.

The young couple – the woman is adolescent, he’s not – go back to the inn and find out the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth encounters dance of death chaos. It’s an unnerving reflection regarding craving and decay, two people aging together as spouses, the attachment and brutality and affection within wedlock.

Not only the most frightening, but likely one of the best concise narratives available, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to appear locally a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I delved into this narrative by a pool overseas in 2020. Although it was sunny I felt a chill within me. I also felt the excitement of anticipation. I was writing a new project, and I had hit a block. I was uncertain if it was possible any good way to craft some of the fearful things the book contains. Reading Zombie, I understood that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the story is a dark flight through the mind of a murderer, Quentin P, based on an infamous individual, the murderer who slaughtered and mutilated multiple victims in a city during a specific period. Infamously, the killer was obsessed with making a zombie sex slave who would stay him and carried out several macabre trials to do so.

The deeds the book depicts are horrific, but just as scary is its own mental realism. The protagonist’s awful, broken reality is directly described with concise language, details omitted. The reader is immersed stuck in his mind, compelled to observe mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The strangeness of his psyche resembles a tangible impact – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Going into Zombie feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I was a somnambulist and later started experiencing nightmares. On one occasion, the fear involved a vision during which I was stuck inside a container and, when I woke up, I found that I had ripped a piece off the window, trying to get out. That house was decaying; when storms came the downstairs hall filled with water, maggots came down from the roof into the bedroom, and on one occasion a large rat scaled the curtains in my sister’s room.

After an acquaintance presented me with this author’s book, I had moved out at my family home, but the story of the house located on the coastline felt familiar to myself, homesick as I was. It’s a book featuring a possessed clamorous, emotional house and a young woman who consumes limestone from the shoreline. I adored the story deeply and returned frequently to the story, always finding {something