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A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson

I discovered this narrative some time back and it has lingered with me from that moment. The titular vacationers turn out to be a couple from New York, who occupy an identical off-grid lakeside house each year. On this occasion, rather than returning to urban life, they decide to lengthen their vacation a few more weeks – something that seems to unsettle each resident in the nearby town. Each repeats the same veiled caution that nobody has ever stayed by the water beyond Labor Day. Even so, the couple are determined to remain, and that’s when things start to become stranger. The individual who supplies the kerosene won’t sell to the couple. Not a single person agrees to bring supplies to the cottage, and when the family endeavor to go to the village, their vehicle refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the batteries within the device fade, and when night comes, “the two old people clung to each other in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What are this couple anticipating? What might the residents be aware of? Every time I revisit the writer’s chilling and inspiring tale, I recall that the top terror originates in the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from a noted author

In this concise narrative two people travel to a typical beach community where bells ring the whole time, an incessant ringing that is annoying and puzzling. The first extremely terrifying scene takes place during the evening, when they choose to go for a stroll and they can’t find the water. The beach is there, the scent exists of decaying seafood and salt, there are waves, but the water seems phantom, or a different entity and worse. It’s just deeply malevolent and each occasion I visit to the shore after dark I think about this story which spoiled the ocean after dark to my mind – in a good way.

The recent spouses – the wife is youthful, he’s not – return to their lodging and discover the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and mortality and youth encounters danse macabre pandemonium. It’s an unnerving meditation about longing and decline, two bodies growing old jointly as partners, the attachment and violence and gentleness in matrimony.

Not just the most frightening, but likely a top example of brief tales available, and an individual preference. I read it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of these tales to be published in this country a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I delved into this narrative by a pool in the French countryside recently. Even with the bright weather I experienced an icy feeling over me. Additionally, I sensed the electricity of fascination. I was composing my latest book, and I had hit an obstacle. I didn’t know if it was possible any good way to write certain terrifying elements the book contains. Going through this book, I understood that it was possible.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a dark flight into the thoughts of a young serial killer, the protagonist, modeled after a notorious figure, the serial killer who killed and cut apart numerous individuals in a city between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, Dahmer was obsessed with producing a compliant victim that would remain by his side and carried out several horrific efforts to do so.

The actions the book depicts are horrific, but just as scary is its psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s terrible, broken reality is simply narrated in spare prose, names redacted. You is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, compelled to see ideas and deeds that appal. The strangeness of his mind resembles a bodily jolt – or getting lost on a desolate planet. Starting this story feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. On one occasion, the fear involved a nightmare during which I was stuck inside a container and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had torn off the slat from the window, seeking to leave. That house was crumbling; when it rained heavily the entranceway filled with water, fly larvae fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and at one time a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in that space.

Once a companion gave me this author’s book, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the story about the home perched on the cliffs felt familiar to me, longing as I felt. It’s a story about a haunted loud, sentimental building and a girl who eats chalk from the cliffs. I adored the story so much and went back repeatedly to its pages, each time discovering {something