A Renowned Horror Author
The Summer People by a master of suspense
I encountered this tale some time back and it has haunted me since then. The titular “summer people” happen to be a family from the city, who rent the same off-grid lakeside house annually. On this occasion, in place of returning to urban life, they decide to prolong their stay for a month longer – an action that appears to alarm everyone in the surrounding community. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that no one has ever stayed by the water past the end of summer. Regardless, they are resolved to remain, and at that point events begin to get increasingly weird. The individual who delivers oil refuses to sell to them. Not a single person agrees to bring supplies to the cabin, and as the family attempt to go to the village, their vehicle won’t start. A tempest builds, the energy within the device die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the aged individuals huddled together in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What are they expecting? What could the townspeople be aware of? Each occasion I read this author’s disturbing and thought-provoking narrative, I recall that the finest fright stems from that which remains hidden.
Mariana Enríquez
Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman
In this short story a couple go to an ordinary beach community where bells ring the whole time, a constant chiming that is bothersome and puzzling. The opening extremely terrifying scene takes place at night, as they decide to take a walk and they can’t find the sea. There’s sand, the scent exists of rotting fish and seawater, there are waves, but the sea is a ghost, or a different entity and worse. It is truly insanely sinister and every time I travel to the coast at night I remember this tale which spoiled the ocean after dark to my mind – in a good way.
The newlyweds – she’s very young, he’s not – head back to the inn and discover the cause of the ringing, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden intersects with danse macabre chaos. It’s a chilling meditation on desire and decay, two people maturing in tandem as partners, the connection and brutality and tenderness within wedlock.
Not only the scariest, but probably among the finest short stories available, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of Aickman stories to appear locally several years back.
Catriona Ward
Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates
I perused this narrative by a pool overseas recently. Although it was sunny I experienced a chill over me. Additionally, I sensed the excitement of anticipation. I was writing my third novel, and I had hit a wall. I was uncertain if it was possible a proper method to craft some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Experiencing this novel, I realized that there was a way.
Released decades ago, the book is a bleak exploration into the thoughts of a young serial killer, the protagonist, inspired by an infamous individual, the serial killer who murdered and cut apart numerous individuals in Milwaukee during a specific period. Infamously, Dahmer was consumed with producing a zombie sex slave who would stay with him and carried out several horrific efforts to do so.
The actions the novel describes are terrible, but similarly terrifying is the emotional authenticity. Quentin P’s terrible, fragmented world is directly described in spare prose, identities hidden. The reader is sunk deep stuck in his mind, forced to observe mental processes and behaviors that appal. The foreignness of his psyche feels like a physical shock – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Going into this book is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.
Daisy Johnson
White Is for Witching by a gifted writer
When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and eventually began suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the fear included a vision in which I was stuck in a box and, when I woke up, I realized that I had torn off a piece off the window, seeking to leave. That home was decaying; when it rained heavily the entranceway became inundated, maggots came down from the roof onto the bed, and at one time a large rat climbed the drapes in the bedroom.
When a friend gave me the story, I was no longer living at my family home, but the tale regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to me, homesick as I was. It is a story about a haunted clamorous, emotional house and a female character who ingests chalk from the shoreline. I loved the book immensely and came back again and again to its pages, always finding {something
