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A Renowned Horror Author

A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense

I discovered this narrative years ago and it has haunted me ever since. The so-called seasonal visitors turn out to be the Allisons from New York, who rent a particular remote country cottage annually. On this occasion, rather than heading back home, they decide to extend their stay for a month longer – a decision that to alarm each resident in the adjacent village. Each repeats a similar vague warning that no one has remained at the lake beyond Labor Day. Nonetheless, they are resolved to not leave, and at that point things start to become stranger. The individual who brings fuel won’t sell to the couple. Nobody is willing to supply groceries to their home, and at the time the family endeavor to drive into town, their vehicle fails to start. A storm gathers, the energy of their radio diminish, and when night comes, “the aged individuals huddled together within their rental and waited”. What might be they expecting? What do the townspeople understand? Whenever I revisit the writer’s unnerving and inspiring story, I remember that the top terror stems from that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this short story a couple go to a typical seaside town in which chimes sound constantly, a perpetual pealing that is irritating and inexplicable. The first extremely terrifying scene takes place after dark, at the time they choose to go for a stroll and they can’t find the water. There’s sand, the scent exists of putrid marine life and seawater, there are waves, but the water appears spectral, or something else and worse. It is truly deeply malevolent and whenever I travel to the coast at night I think about this story that ruined the sea at night for me – positively.

The newlyweds – she’s very young, the man is mature – go back to the hotel and discover why the bells ring, in a long sequence of confinement, gruesome festivities and demise and innocence encounters danse macabre bedlam. It’s a chilling meditation about longing and decline, two people growing old jointly as partners, the connection and brutality and tenderness within wedlock.

Not merely the most frightening, but likely one of the best concise narratives available, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in Spanish, in the first edition of this author’s works to appear in Argentina several years back.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into Zombie by a pool overseas recently. Despite the sunshine I experienced a chill within me. Additionally, I sensed the excitement of fascination. I was working on my latest book, and I encountered an obstacle. I didn’t know if there was any good way to write various frightening aspects the narrative involves. Going through this book, I realized that there was a way.

Published in 1995, the book is a bleak exploration within the psyche of a criminal, the main character, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who slaughtered and mutilated numerous individuals in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, the killer was obsessed with producing a compliant victim who would never leave by his side and made many horrific efforts to accomplish it.

The acts the story tells are appalling, but similarly terrifying is its own emotional authenticity. The character’s awful, shattered existence is simply narrated with concise language, identities hidden. The reader is sunk deep stuck in his mind, obliged to witness thoughts and actions that appal. The foreignness of his mind feels like a physical shock – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Going into Zombie is less like reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel by a gifted writer

In my early years, I walked in my sleep and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the terror featured a vision during which I was trapped in a box and, as I roused, I found that I had torn off the slat from the window, seeking to leave. That house was decaying; when storms came the ground floor corridor filled with water, maggots dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a large rat climbed the drapes in the bedroom.

Once a companion presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out in my childhood residence, but the story of the house perched on the cliffs appeared known to myself, homesick as I felt. It’s a novel featuring a possessed noisy, atmospheric home and a female character who consumes chalk from the shoreline. I loved the story deeply and returned repeatedly to it, each time discovering {something