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A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I read this tale some time back and it has lingered with me since then. The named seasonal visitors are a family urban dwellers, who occupy the same remote rural cabin annually. On this occasion, instead of going back to the city, they opt to extend their holiday for a month longer – something that seems to alarm each resident in the surrounding community. Each repeats an identical cryptic advice that not a soul has remained by the water past the end of summer. Even so, the couple insist to stay, and that is the moment situations commence to grow more bizarre. The individual who delivers the kerosene refuses to sell to them. Not a single person agrees to bring supplies to their home, and at the time they try to drive into town, their vehicle won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the power within the device fade, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple clung to each other within their rental and waited”. What might be the Allisons anticipating? What could the townspeople be aware of? Every time I peruse this author’s disturbing and inspiring story, I recall that the top terror originates in the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from a noted author

In this short story two people travel to an ordinary seaside town in which chimes sound constantly, a constant chiming that is annoying and puzzling. The first extremely terrifying moment happens after dark, at the time they decide to go for a stroll and they can’t find the ocean. The beach is there, the scent exists of decaying seafood and brine, there are waves, but the ocean is a ghost, or something else and worse. It is truly profoundly ominous and every time I visit to the coast in the evening I recall this narrative which spoiled the ocean after dark in my view – in a good way.

The newlyweds – she’s very young, the husband is older – return to the hotel and discover the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and demise and innocence encounters danse macabre bedlam. It’s a chilling reflection on desire and decline, two people maturing in tandem as partners, the connection and aggression and tenderness within wedlock.

Not only the most terrifying, but perhaps a top example of concise narratives in existence, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of this author’s works to appear locally a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this narrative near the water in the French countryside in 2020. Despite the sunshine I experienced cold creep within me. I also experienced the thrill of anticipation. I was writing my latest book, and I had hit an obstacle. I didn’t know if there was any good way to write various frightening aspects the story includes. Reading Zombie, I realized that it could be done.

Published in 1995, the novel is a dark flight into the thoughts of a young serial killer, Quentin P, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who killed and mutilated 17 young men and boys in a city during a specific period. Infamously, the killer was consumed with creating a compliant victim who would stay with him and attempted numerous horrific efforts to achieve this.

The actions the novel describes are appalling, but just as scary is its own mental realism. The protagonist’s terrible, fragmented world is simply narrated with concise language, identities hidden. You is plunged caught in his thoughts, obliged to see thoughts and actions that appal. The strangeness of his psyche is like a physical shock – or getting lost in an empty realm. Going into this story is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I sleepwalked and later started having night terrors. At one point, the fear included a vision in which I was stuck inside a container and, when I woke up, I found that I had ripped a part out of the window frame, trying to get out. That house was decaying; when storms came the entranceway flooded, fly larvae dropped from above onto the bed, and once a big rodent ascended the window coverings in the bedroom.

When a friend gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out at my family home, but the tale regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs appeared known in my view, longing at that time. It’s a book featuring a possessed noisy, atmospheric home and a girl who consumes calcium from the cliffs. I loved the novel immensely and returned repeatedly to it, always finding {something