🔗 Share this article

A Renowned Horror Author

A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson

I discovered this narrative some time back and it has haunted me from that moment. The named seasonal visitors happen to be a couple from New York, who lease an identical off-grid rural cabin every summer. During this visit, rather than going back to the city, they choose to prolong their holiday for a month longer – a decision that to disturb all the locals in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that nobody has remained by the water beyond the holiday. Even so, they are determined to remain, and that is the moment events begin to become stranger. The person who delivers the kerosene declines to provide for them. No one agrees to bring groceries to the cabin, and as the family endeavor to go to the village, the car refuses to operate. A storm gathers, the power in the radio fade, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people crowded closely in their summer cottage and waited”. What could be this couple expecting? What could the residents understand? Each occasion I revisit the writer’s disturbing and influential tale, I recall that the finest fright stems from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by a noted author

In this concise narrative two people go to an ordinary beach community where church bells toll continuously, a constant chiming that is irritating and unexplainable. The initial extremely terrifying episode happens during the evening, when they opt to go for a stroll and they fail to see the ocean. There’s sand, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and brine, there are waves, but the water is a ghost, or a different entity and even more alarming. It’s just profoundly ominous and every time I travel to the coast at night I recall this story that ruined the sea at night for me – favorably.

The newlyweds – the wife is youthful, the man is mature – go back to the inn and learn the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth intersects with danse macabre bedlam. It’s a chilling reflection on desire and decline, two bodies growing old jointly as partners, the attachment and violence and affection in matrimony.

Not merely the most terrifying, but probably among the finest brief tales out there, and a beloved choice. I experienced it en español, in the first edition of Aickman stories to appear in Argentina a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer

I read this narrative by a pool in France in 2020. Although it was sunny I felt a chill over me. I also felt the thrill of anticipation. I was working on my latest book, and I faced an obstacle. I was uncertain if it was possible an effective approach to compose some of the fearful things the book contains. Going through this book, I understood that it was possible.

Published in 1995, the story is a grim journey within the psyche of a criminal, the protagonist, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who slaughtered and cut apart multiple victims in Milwaukee during a specific period. Infamously, this person was obsessed with producing a zombie sex slave who would stay him and carried out several grisly attempts to accomplish it.

The deeds the novel describes are terrible, but equally frightening is its own emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s awful, fragmented world is directly described using minimal words, details omitted. The reader is immersed caught in his thoughts, obliged to observe thoughts and actions that shock. The foreignness of his psyche is like a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Starting this book is less like reading but a complete immersion. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I sleepwalked and eventually began experiencing nightmares. On one occasion, the terror included a nightmare where I was confined in a box and, when I woke up, I realized that I had removed a part off the window, seeking to leave. That house was falling apart; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall filled with water, fly larvae came down from the roof into the bedroom, and once a large rat climbed the drapes in the bedroom.

After an acquaintance presented me with the story, I had moved out with my parents, but the tale of the house perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable to me, homesick as I felt. It is a novel featuring a possessed noisy, sentimental building and a young woman who consumes calcium from the cliffs. I adored the novel immensely and went back again and again to its pages, always finding {something