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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 stayed with me ever since. The so-called seasonal visitors turn out to be a couple from the city, who occupy an identical remote lakeside house each year. This time, instead of going back home, they decide to lengthen their stay a few more weeks – an action that appears to unsettle everyone in the nearby town. Each repeats a similar vague warning that not a soul has remained by the water beyond the end of summer. Nonetheless, the Allisons are resolved to not leave, and that is the moment things start to get increasingly weird. The man who supplies the kerosene refuses to sell for them. No one will deliver food to the cottage, and when the Allisons try to go to the village, their vehicle won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the energy of their radio diminish, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people huddled together in their summer cottage and waited”. What could be they waiting for? What could the locals understand? Each occasion I revisit the writer’s disturbing and influential narrative, I’m reminded that the finest fright stems from that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by a noted author

In this brief tale two people go to a typical seaside town where church bells toll the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and inexplicable. The opening truly frightening scene occurs during the evening, when they decide to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the sea. The beach is there, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and seawater, surf is audible, but the ocean is a ghost, or something else and even more alarming. It is truly deeply malevolent and whenever I go to the shore after dark I remember this story that destroyed the sea at night in my view – positively.

The newlyweds – she’s very young, the man is mature – return to their lodging and find out why the bells ring, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, necro-orgy and demise and innocence meets grim ballet bedlam. It’s a chilling reflection regarding craving and decay, a pair of individuals aging together as partners, the bond and aggression and affection of marriage.

Not just the scariest, but perhaps a top example of concise narratives in existence, and a beloved choice. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of this author’s works to be released in Argentina in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates

I perused Zombie near the water in the French countryside a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I experienced an icy feeling within me. I also felt the excitement of anticipation. I was working on my third novel, and I had hit a block. I wasn’t sure whether there existed any good way to craft some of the fearful things the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I understood that it was possible.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a grim journey into the thoughts of a criminal, Quentin P, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who slaughtered and dismembered numerous individuals in the Midwest over a decade. Notoriously, Dahmer was obsessed with producing a compliant victim that would remain by his side and made many macabre trials to achieve this.

The actions the book depicts are terrible, but similarly terrifying is its own psychological persuasiveness. The character’s dreadful, shattered existence is plainly told using minimal words, names redacted. You is plunged stuck in his mind, forced to see thoughts and actions that shock. The alien nature of his thinking is like a bodily jolt – or getting lost 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 by a gifted writer

In my early years, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced having night terrors. Once, the fear included a vision in which I was trapped within an enclosure and, upon awakening, I discovered that I had torn off a part out of the window frame, attempting to escape. That home was crumbling; during heavy rain the downstairs hall filled with water, maggots fell from the ceiling onto the bed, and once a large rat ascended the window coverings in the bedroom.

Once a companion handed me this author’s book, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the tale of the house perched on the cliffs felt familiar to myself, homesick as I felt. It’s a book about a haunted noisy, atmospheric home and a young woman who consumes limestone from the shoreline. I adored the story deeply and went back again and again to the story, always finding {something