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A Renowned Horror Author

A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson

I read this narrative years ago and it has haunted me since then. The named seasonal visitors happen to be a couple urban dwellers, who rent the same off-grid lakeside house every summer. During this visit, rather than going back to urban life, they opt to extend their holiday a few more weeks – something that seems to unsettle each resident in the surrounding community. All pass on the same veiled caution that no one has ever stayed at the lake past Labor Day. Even so, the couple are resolved to stay, and at that point events begin to grow more bizarre. The person who supplies oil refuses to sell to them. Not a single person is willing to supply groceries to the cottage, and as the family try to go to the village, the car won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the batteries in the radio fade, and when night comes, “the two old people crowded closely in their summer cottage and waited”. What are the Allisons anticipating? What could the residents understand? Every time I peruse Jackson’s unnerving and inspiring tale, I’m reminded that the top terror comes from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by a noted author

In this brief tale a pair go to a typical coastal village in which chimes sound constantly, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and unexplainable. The opening very scary episode occurs during the evening, at the time they choose to walk around and they can’t find the ocean. Sand is present, there is the odor of putrid marine life and salt, there are waves, but the water is a ghost, or a different entity and worse. It’s just insanely sinister and whenever I travel to the coast after dark I recall this tale which spoiled the sea at night in my view – positively.

The young couple – the woman is adolescent, the husband is older – go back to the inn and find out why the bells ring, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and demise and innocence meets dance of death chaos. It’s an unnerving meditation regarding craving and deterioration, two bodies aging together as partners, the bond and aggression and tenderness of marriage.

Not just the scariest, but perhaps one of the best brief tales in existence, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of this author’s works to be released locally in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I read this book near the water in France in 2020. Even with the bright weather I felt a chill within me. I also felt the electricity of anticipation. I was working on my third novel, and I encountered a wall. I was uncertain whether there existed any good way to compose various frightening aspects the book contains. Reading Zombie, I saw that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a dark flight into the thoughts of a young serial killer, the protagonist, modeled after an infamous individual, the criminal who killed and dismembered multiple victims in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, this person was consumed with creating a submissive individual who would never leave with him and carried out several macabre trials to achieve this.

The acts the book depicts are horrific, but equally frightening is the psychological persuasiveness. The protagonist’s awful, fragmented world is plainly told in spare prose, details omitted. The reader is immersed caught in his thoughts, forced to observe ideas and deeds that shock. The foreignness of his thinking feels like a tangible impact – or getting lost on a desolate planet. Starting this book is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel by a gifted writer

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and subsequently commenced having night terrors. At one point, the fear included a nightmare during which I was confined within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had removed a piece off the window, seeking to leave. That building was crumbling; during heavy rain the ground floor corridor filled with water, maggots fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and on one occasion a large rat ascended the window coverings in that space.

Once a companion presented me with the story, I was residing elsewhere in my childhood residence, but the narrative of the house perched on the cliffs seemed recognizable to myself, longing at that time. It’s a story concerning a ghostly noisy, atmospheric home and a young woman who consumes limestone from the cliffs. I adored the story deeply and came back again and again to the story, always finding {something