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A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People by a master of suspense

I discovered this tale some time back and it has lingered with me ever since. The so-called “summer people” turn out to be the Allisons from New York, who rent a particular isolated rural cabin each year. During this visit, rather than heading back home, they opt to extend their holiday for a month longer – something that seems to alarm all the locals in the surrounding community. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that not a soul has ever stayed at the lake beyond the holiday. Nonetheless, they are determined to stay, and that’s when events begin to grow more bizarre. The person who delivers fuel won’t sell to them. Nobody will deliver groceries to the cabin, and as the family try to drive into town, their vehicle refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the energy within the device fade, and as darkness falls, “the aged individuals huddled together inside their cabin and waited”. What could be this couple expecting? What might the residents be aware of? Every time I read the writer’s chilling and influential narrative, I recall that the best horror comes from what’s left undisclosed.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman

In this short story a pair travel to a common beach community where bells ring continuously, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and unexplainable. The first very scary moment takes place at night, when they opt to take a walk and they are unable to locate the sea. The beach is there, there is the odor of rotting fish and brine, there are waves, but the water is a ghost, or a different entity and more dreadful. It’s just profoundly ominous and whenever I travel to the coast at night I think about this tale that destroyed the ocean after dark to my mind – in a good way.

The newlyweds – the wife is youthful, the husband is older – head back to the hotel and find out the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and mortality and youth meets danse macabre chaos. It is a disturbing contemplation on desire and decay, two people aging together as a couple, the bond and violence and gentleness of marriage.

Not just the most terrifying, but likely a top example of brief tales out there, and a personal favourite. I experienced it en español, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to be released in Argentina a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I perused this book near the water overseas in 2020. Even with the bright weather I felt cold creep over me. I also felt the excitement of fascination. I was working on a new project, and I faced a wall. I didn’t know if there was a proper method to compose certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Going through this book, I realized that there was a way.

Published in 1995, the story is a grim journey through the mind of a criminal, the main character, based on a notorious figure, the serial killer who killed and dismembered 17 young men and boys in a city during a specific period. As is well-known, the killer was obsessed with creating a submissive individual that would remain with him and made many macabre trials to accomplish it.

The acts the story tells are appalling, but just as scary is its mental realism. The protagonist’s awful, fragmented world is directly described using minimal words, details omitted. The audience is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, compelled to witness ideas and deeds that appal. The foreignness of his thinking feels like a tangible impact – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Entering this book feels different from reading but a complete immersion. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I sleepwalked and later started experiencing nightmares. On one occasion, the terror included a dream in which I was confined in a box and, as I roused, I found that I had removed the slat from the window, seeking to leave. That home was falling apart; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall filled with water, maggots dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and once a sizeable vermin climbed the drapes in that space.

Once a companion presented me with this author’s book, I was no longer living at my family home, but the narrative of the house perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable in my view, homesick at that time. It’s a book featuring a possessed loud, emotional house and a girl who ingests calcium from the shoreline. I adored the novel so much and went back frequently to the story, always finding {something