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A Renowned Horror Author

A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense

I encountered this story some time back and it has haunted me ever since. The titular “summer people” are the Allisons urban dwellers, who rent a particular remote country cottage each year. This time, instead of heading back home, they choose to prolong their stay a few more weeks – something that seems to disturb everyone in the surrounding community. Each repeats an identical cryptic advice that no one has ever stayed by the water past Labor Day. Even so, the Allisons are determined to remain, and that is the moment situations commence to get increasingly weird. The individual who supplies fuel declines to provide to the couple. Not a single person is willing to supply groceries to the cottage, and as they endeavor to go to the village, the car refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the batteries of their radio diminish, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals huddled together in their summer cottage and expected”. What are the Allisons expecting? What do the townspeople know? Each occasion I peruse this author’s unnerving and inspiring tale, I recall that the finest fright stems from that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by a noted author

In this short story two people travel to an ordinary beach community where church bells toll continuously, an incessant ringing that is irritating and unexplainable. The opening very scary episode happens at night, when they decide to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the sea. Sand is present, the scent exists of putrid marine life and brine, there are waves, but the ocean seems phantom, or a different entity and even more alarming. It is simply profoundly ominous and whenever I go to the shore after dark I remember this tale that ruined the sea at night to my mind – positively.

The young couple – she’s very young, the man is mature – go back to the inn and learn why the bells ring, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and demise and innocence meets dance of death bedlam. It is a disturbing contemplation on desire and decay, two bodies maturing in tandem as a couple, the bond and brutality and tenderness within wedlock.

Not just the scariest, but perhaps a top example of short stories available, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in Spanish, in the initial publication of this author’s works to be released in this country a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates

I perused this book by a pool in the French countryside recently. Although it was sunny I experienced cold creep over me. Additionally, I sensed the thrill of anticipation. I was writing my third novel, and I had hit an obstacle. I didn’t know whether there existed any good way to compose certain terrifying elements the story includes. Reading Zombie, I saw that it was possible.

Published in 1995, the novel is a dark flight into the thoughts of a young serial killer, Quentin P, inspired by a notorious figure, the murderer who killed and cut apart multiple victims in a city between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, Dahmer was consumed with producing a compliant victim that would remain by his side and carried out several horrific efforts to achieve this.

The acts the book depicts are appalling, but similarly terrifying is its psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s awful, shattered existence is plainly told with concise language, identities hidden. The reader is plunged stuck in his mind, forced to witness mental processes and behaviors that appal. The strangeness of his thinking is like a physical shock – or being stranded in an empty realm. Starting this book is less like reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from a gifted writer

In my early years, I walked in my sleep and later started suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the horror included a nightmare during which I was trapped in a box and, as I roused, I realized that I had ripped the slat off the window, trying to get out. That building was decaying; during heavy rain the entranceway became inundated, insect eggs came down from the roof onto the bed, and on one occasion a sizeable vermin climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.

After an acquaintance gave me the story, I had moved out in my childhood residence, but the narrative about the home perched on the cliffs felt familiar in my view, longing as I was. It is a book featuring a possessed clamorous, sentimental building and a girl who eats limestone off the rocks. I adored the novel immensely and went back repeatedly to its pages, always finding {something