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A Renowned Horror Author

A Chilling Tale from Shirley Jackson

I read this narrative long ago and it has stayed with me since then. The titular seasonal visitors happen to be a couple from New York, who rent a particular off-grid country cottage annually. On this occasion, in place of returning to the city, they opt to lengthen their holiday an extra month – something that seems to alarm each resident in the surrounding community. Everyone conveys the same veiled caution that not a soul has ever stayed by the water beyond the holiday. Even so, they insist to remain, and that’s when things start to get increasingly weird. The man who delivers oil won’t sell to the couple. Nobody is willing to supply food to their home, and when they attempt to drive into town, their vehicle refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the energy of their radio die, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple clung to each other inside their cabin and anticipated”. What are this couple anticipating? What might the townspeople be aware of? Whenever I read this author’s chilling and influential story, I remember that the finest fright originates in the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this short story a pair travel to an ordinary beach community in which chimes sound constantly, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and puzzling. The opening extremely terrifying moment occurs at night, at the time they decide to go for a stroll and they can’t find the water. There’s sand, there is the odor of rotting fish and salt, waves crash, but the ocean seems phantom, or a different entity and more dreadful. It is simply deeply malevolent and whenever I visit to the coast after dark I remember this story that destroyed the ocean after dark in my view – in a good way.

The newlyweds – the wife is youthful, he’s not – head back to the inn and discover why the bells ring, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and mortality and youth intersects with dance of death chaos. It’s an unnerving reflection about longing and decline, two bodies growing old jointly as a couple, the connection and brutality and gentleness within wedlock.

Not merely the most terrifying, but perhaps a top example of brief tales available, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of these tales to be published locally several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates

I read this narrative by a pool in France in 2020. Despite the sunshine I experienced a chill over me. I also felt the excitement of anticipation. I was working on my latest book, and I encountered a block. I didn’t know if there was a proper method to compose certain terrifying elements the book contains. Going through this book, I understood that it could be done.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a bleak exploration within the psyche of a young serial killer, the main character, based on a notorious figure, the criminal who murdered and cut apart numerous individuals in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, the killer was consumed with making a zombie sex slave that would remain with him and made many grisly attempts to achieve this.

The deeds the book depicts are horrific, but similarly terrifying is its own psychological persuasiveness. The protagonist’s awful, shattered existence is plainly told using minimal words, names redacted. The reader is immersed trapped in his consciousness, compelled to witness thoughts and actions that horrify. The strangeness of his psyche feels like a bodily jolt – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Entering this book is less like reading than a full body experience. You are absorbed completely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I sleepwalked and later started having night terrors. Once, the terror included a dream where I was confined within an enclosure and, upon awakening, I found that I had ripped the slat from the window, attempting to escape. That house was crumbling; when it rained heavily the ground floor corridor flooded, fly larvae came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a large rat scaled the curtains in that space.

When a friend gave me this author’s book, I was no longer living with my parents, but the story regarding the building located on the coastline appeared known to me, nostalgic as I felt. This is a story featuring a possessed noisy, atmospheric home and a female character who eats calcium from the shoreline. I adored the story immensely and returned again and again to its pages, each time discovering {something