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A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People by a master of suspense

I discovered this narrative long ago and it has lingered with me since then. The titular “summer people” happen to be a family from the city, who rent a particular remote rural cabin every summer. During this visit, instead of heading back to urban life, they opt to lengthen their holiday a few more weeks – an action that appears to alarm all the locals in the adjacent village. Each repeats the same veiled caution that nobody has lingered in the area past Labor Day. Regardless, the Allisons are determined to stay, and that’s when events begin to grow more bizarre. The man who supplies oil declines to provide for them. No one will deliver supplies to the cottage, and at the time the Allisons endeavor to travel to the community, the automobile fails to start. A tempest builds, the energy in the radio die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people clung to each other inside their cabin and waited”. What could be the Allisons expecting? What could the townspeople be aware of? Every time I revisit Jackson’s disturbing and inspiring story, I remember that the best horror originates in the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman

In this brief tale a pair journey to an ordinary seaside town where church bells toll constantly, an incessant ringing that is irritating and inexplicable. The opening extremely terrifying episode occurs at night, when they choose to take a walk and they can’t find the ocean. The beach is there, there is the odor of decaying seafood and seawater, there are waves, but the sea seems phantom, or something else and even more alarming. It is truly profoundly ominous and every time I travel to the coast after dark I recall this story which spoiled the ocean after dark to my mind – favorably.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, the husband is older – head back to the inn and find out why the bells ring, during a prolonged scene of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden encounters danse macabre pandemonium. It’s a chilling contemplation about longing and decay, two bodies maturing in tandem as partners, the bond and brutality and tenderness within wedlock.

Not just the most frightening, but probably one of the best concise narratives out there, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in Spanish, in the first edition of this author’s works to be released in this country a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer

I delved into this book near the water overseas recently. Although it was sunny I felt cold creep within me. I also felt the thrill of excitement. I was composing a new project, and I had hit an obstacle. I didn’t know if there was any good way to craft various frightening aspects the book contains. Going through this book, I realized that it could be done.

Published in 1995, the novel is a grim journey through the mind of a murderer, Quentin P, modeled after a notorious figure, the serial killer who murdered and cut apart numerous individuals in the Midwest over a decade. Infamously, this person was obsessed with producing a compliant victim who would never leave with him and carried out several macabre trials to do so.

The acts the story tells are horrific, but equally frightening is its psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s awful, broken reality is directly described in spare prose, identities hidden. You is sunk deep stuck in his mind, obliged to witness thoughts and actions that shock. The foreignness of his thinking is like a bodily jolt – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Entering this story is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I sleepwalked and later started suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the horror involved a dream in which I was trapped in a box and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had torn off a piece off the window, seeking to leave. That home was crumbling; when storms came the entranceway flooded, fly larvae came down from the roof on to my parents’ bed, and on one occasion a large rat ascended the window coverings in that space.

When a friend gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out with my parents, but the tale regarding the building perched on the cliffs appeared known in my view, nostalgic as I felt. It is a novel featuring a possessed noisy, emotional house and a girl who consumes calcium from the shoreline. I loved the story deeply and came back frequently to it, each time discovering {something